A princess of real grace and few pretensions
sir – In your obituary (July 28) of the photographer Reginald Davis, you quote Mr Davis as saying, of Princess Grace of Monaco, that: “She certainly wasn’t the sort of person you’d dare remind that her grandad was an Irish bricklayer, not for all the chips in Monte Carlo.”
My experience of speaking with Grace of Monaco (née Grace Kelly) was quite different. I interviewed her a couple of years before her death and she spoke quite openly and unaffectedly about her Irish forebears. She was not at all ashamed of her roots. The family had worked hard for their fortune in the building trade. She mentioned that because her father had worked with his hands, and was thus classified as a “labourer”, he was barred from entering sculling competitions as an oarsman – though he was an accomplished athlete.
She quite wittily remarked to me that one of the reasons why she liked the British Royal family, and especially the Queen, was that “they were a lot less snobby than the folks in Philadelphia”.
My interview was published in the Sunday Independent in Dublin. In the first edition, either by genuine error or due to a waggish sub-editor, the headline read: "Grace interviews Princess Mary Kenny".
Mary Kenny
Deal, Kent