The glorious Guinness girls
A century ago, three heiresses lit up the Roaring Twenties in Ireland’s loveliest houses with charm and gaiety. By Emily Hourican
‘Churchill whipped him across the face, catching his eye and scarring him for life’
John Huston called them ‘witches – lovely ones to be sure. They are all transparent-skinned, with pale hair and light blue eyes. You can very nearly see through them.’ They were the three Glorious Guinness Girls: sisters with, between them, eight marriages, 13 children, three very grand houses and three very distinct personalities.
Aileen, the eldest, was elegant and social. She moved through a jet-set world of movie stars, society heiresses and international playboys, including the Aga Khan and Ursula Andress.
Maureen, the middle child (with all the look-at-me desire to shock that being the middle child can animate), made a virtue of her connections, conducting a lifelong obsession with royalty and the Queen Mother in particular.
Oonagh, the youngest and sweetest (and, she believed, her father’s favourite), was almost a bohemian. A friend to artists and poets, she kept open house at Luggala, just outside Dublin. There she entertained Brendan Behan, Sean O’casey, Claud Cockburn and, later, when her son Tara grew up, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg and John Paul Getty II.
They were the daughters of Arthur Ernest Guinness, second son of the first Earl of Iveagh (these were the brewing Guinnesses, rather than the banking Guinnesses or clerical Guinnesses).
His younger brother, Walter, later Lord Moyne, was Minister of State in the Middle East, while the elder, Rupert, once shared a governess with Winston Churchill – and lived to bear the scars.
The boys were once bought a toy harness and coachman’s whip. ‘You be the horse,’ the young Churchill said. When Rupert didn’t want to, Churchill whipped him across the face, catching his eye and scarring him for life.
‘Parties lasted days, with guests falling asleep, then waking and starting again’
Aileen was born in 1904, Maureen in 1907 and Oonagh in 1910. They spent their childhoods mostly in Ireland, at a house called Glenmaroon which was actually two houses. There was a home cinema, an indoor swimming pool, even a coal scuttle that played a tune.
In 1923, the Guinness family set off on a round-the-world yacht trip, aboard the Fantôme II. When they came back to Britain a year later, they began their social careers properly. They were just in time to join in with the Bright Young Things – those giddy young people who were too young to fight in the First World War, with a complicated mix of shame at not having joined up, along with a feeling that life was short and should be lived fully and outrageously.
Throughout the Roaring Twenties, the Guinnesses were part of that group that orbited around Baby and Zita Jungman, Stephen Tennant and their cousin, Bryan Guinness, then married to Diana Mitford.
The Guinness girls soon married: Aileen in 1927 to Brinsley Sheridan Bushe Plunket; Oonagh in 1929 to Philip Kindersley; and Maureen in 1930 to Basil Sheridan Hamilton-temple-blackwood.
Each had £1 million (around £65 million today) settled on her by Ernest. Aileen moved back to Ireland, to Luttrellstown Castle, where she threw herself into whatever society Ireland had to offer at the time – mostly revolving round horses.
The marriage didn’t last – by the start of the Second World War, Aileen and Brinny were divorced. Aileen sat the war out in America, leaving her daughters with Oonagh – she by then was also divorced, and remarried to Lord Oranmore and Browne (whom her father nicknamed ‘the Stallion’). They lived at Castle Macgarrett, County Mayo, in a jolly mix of his five children from his first marriage, her two children with Philip, their son Garech, and now Aileen’s daughters.
Maureen, meanwhile, had become Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava barely two weeks after her marriage, when her husband’s father was killed in a plane crash. Clandeboye, the vast family house in County Down, had a 3,000-acre estate. Maureen preferred to spend time in London, where she continued to give lavish parties, distinguished by practical jokes described by the poet John Betjeman as ‘pretty good hell’.
Her husband, the new Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was killed in 1945 at Ava in Burma, from where his ancestor had taken his title. On the day of his death, he wrote home to his children, ‘God bless you, my darling Perdita and Caroline and Sheridan … work hard, love your mother and daddy … I’ll write again soon.’
Oonagh divorced Lord Oranmore and Browne in 1950. They had been through several tragedies together. Dominick’s daughter Biddy died of pneumonia. In 1943, a child born to the couple died after two days and before being named. Shortly afterwards, Oonagh lost custody of her son Gay despite a protracted court battle. In 1946, her daughter, Tessa, died aged 14 after she had an allergic reaction to a diphtheria injection.
After the divorce, Oonagh moved to Luggala, a house described as ‘the most decorative honeypot in Ireland’. Visitors talk about parties that lasted days, with guests falling asleep wherever they happened to be, sometimes midconversation, then waking and starting over again, fuelled by champagne and Bloody Marys.
Oonagh at Luggala and Aileen, by then back at Luttrellstown, embodied the twin peaks of Irish social life at the time. As Oonagh’s children, Garech and Tara, grew up, they brought her into the worlds of Irish music. Garech was a lifetime lover of Irish culture and it was his record label that launched The Chieftains.
Tara was a kind of It Boy of his time, a haunter of nightclubs, a friend of models and pop stars, and inspiration for the Beatles song A Day in the Life after his death in a car crash in 1966, at the age of only 21.
In 1957 Oonagh was married for a third time, to Miguel Ferreras, a Cuban couturier. He managed to run through a large amount of her considerable wealth before she discovered he was in fact a former Spanish fascist who’d taken the name of a friend’s deceased brother. She had her marriage dissolved in 1965, on the grounds that ‘Ferreras’ was legally dead, and reverted to the title Lady Oranmore and Browne. Oonagh died in 1995; Maureen died in 1998.
Aileen’s second marriage was to a Yugoslavian interior decorator who, like Oonagh’s third husband, was flamboyant and madly extravagant, and ran through much of her money before they divorced in 1965. She died in 1999.
Long before writing about the Guinnesses, I read about them. Guinness is a name that crops up constantly; in history, politics, business, social diaries and other people’s biographies. In Ireland, many of our state buildings, including the Irish Embassy in London and the official Irish state guest house, were once homes of various Guinnesses.
It was Aileen, Maureen and Oonagh who really captured my imagination. So much money, glamour and beauty; such privileged and amusing lives; but also plenty of heartache and tragedy.
Of the three, only Maureen seemed really to enjoy herself. Aileen and Oonagh both appeared burdened by their wealth and at heart rather unhappy. Romantic love was clearly a struggle for all three – and motherhood not easy, except maybe for Oonagh, who tragically lost three children; Maureen and Aileen both lost husbands to the war.
Their lives were irresponsible, but that didn’t mean they weren’t painful. And yet all three had a kind of charming, insouciant gaiety. They took the business of frivolity seriously, and were correspondingly anachronistic. When a generation of women was, for the first time, considering careers and looking further than their own homes for fulfilment, the Guinnesses were content with diaphanous roles as muses and patrons.
It’s impossible to write about real, unknown people and not ask myself whether I’d have liked them.
I think I would have. They fascinated me enough to make me want to write a novel about them. I did so – and they still fascinate me.
The Glorious Guinness Girls by Emily Hourican is published by Headline Review (£20)