Castle Blunden’s sisters on how to divide up a castle’s contents
Ireland’s Fine Arts, antiques and collectables column
The story of the Blundens of Castle Blunden, Co Kilkenny, reads like a Jane Austen novel. When Pamela, Lady Blunden (née Purser), died in 2017 at the ripe old age of 94, she left a fine old 18th-century house and six daughters. But the estate was entailed and the daughters could not inherit. The title, the castle and its contents, went to a nephew and the six aunties were thrown back on their own resources. Two of them, the twin sisters, Jane and Caroline, repaired to Blunden Villa, a beautiful Regency dower house. The romance of their situation is not lost on them. “We’re just like the Dashwoods in Sense and Sensibility!”
Unlike Jane Austen’s fictional characters, the 20th-century Blunden women had ample opportunity to make their way. Caroline is the co-author, with Mark Elvin, of the Cultural Atlas of China (1983); Jane went to Mongolia in search of wild horses and, for lack of an adequate guide book, wrote one herself. She then opened a café in rural France. But both retained a strong emotional connection to Kilkenny and the house where they grew up.
Like any Irish country house, Castle Blunden was cluttered with the residual possessions of generations of Blundens. The new baronet didn’t want all of it and, by the terms of the will, the rest was to be divided between her daughters. This sounds like a recipe for a fight, but it wasn’t. “It was easy,” Caroline explains. “We bought a book of different coloured
stickers. Each of us had a set number, all of the same colour. Then we went around the house and put a sticker on anything that we wanted to keep. When we were finished, we went around and looked at the things with more than one sticker. Then we worked out who should keep what. There was an old mirror in a gilded frame,” Jane adds.
“We decided that it should go to Fiona. She’s a professional gilder and the only one of us who can really make it sing. We resolved everything in less than an hour. Then we had a group hug. The energy in that hug was incredible!”
The remainder goes under the hammer at Sheppard’s Castle Blunden sale next week.
And it’s a fascinating sale. A pair of 18th-century Irish tray-top pedestals, each with a tambour front, raised on square chamfered legs (Lot 222: est. €5,000 to €8,000) have the double whammy of association with a famous family and being serious antiques in their own right.
But much of the residue of Castle Blunden is idiosyncratic. The size of the estimate, which reflects the auctioneers’ opinion of the monetary value of the lots, often bears no relation of the status that they held within the family.
“Our mother’s typewriter!” Caroline exclaims. “She could type brilliantly on it — 80 words a minute — and she insisted that we learned how to type too.” The twins were sent into the technical college in Kilkenny to acquire the skill of typing.
“There were two students in the class and one wonderful nun,” Jane says. “It’s very useful being able to type properly — with all four fingers and a thumb — but we were never as good on the typewriter as our mother was.” The 1956 Remington typewriter (Lot 443: est. €100 to €150) is included in the sale, as is a leather suitcase clearly marked: “2/O P.M. Blunden. W.R.N.S. (Lot 216: est. €50 to €80). It belonged to Lady Pamela who served in the WRNS in the Second World War and worked in intelligence. This was where she learned to type.
There are many such objects in the sale: rich in mythology, but belonging to a context that no longer exists. Some will retain their meaning; others will be given new meanings by new owners. There’s the “Early 20th-century dolls’ house, 120cm high; 90cm wide (Lot 713: est. €200 to €300). “It was such a wonderful playhouse,” Jane says. “Our grandfather put in electric light, using tiny torch bulbs and a single switch. When you flicked the switch, every room lit up. Can you imagine the impact that it had on us as children?” At that time, not every house in rural Ireland would have access to electric light. Their maternal grandfather, John Purser, was an engineer and the sale includes a cased barograph, presented when he retired as Chair of Civil Engineering in Dublin University in 1957 (Lot 409: est. €500 to €800).
The auction takes place at Sheppard’s Auction Rooms in Durrow, Co Laois, on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The sale also includes pieces from “other important clients” and only the lots marked with an asterisk (*Provenance: Collection of Sir William and Lady Blunden, Castle Blunden, Kilkenny, Ireland) are of true Blunden origin.