Laments for Lady Lavery’s lover up for auction
“I am so miserable and alone,” wrote Lady Hazel Lavery on learning of the death of Kevin O’Higgins, a Free State minister assassinated in 1927 by anti-treaty forces.
“I saw him all day on Thursday, and this morning I had a letter from him; written on Saturday. It is all such a cruel cruel thing — for us all and our Ireland,” she wrote in a telegram to General Eoin O’Duffy, asking him to place a bunch of flowers for her in O’Higgins coffin.
The telegram, dated Jul 1927, asks O’Duffy to bring the box of flowers she has sent him and place them near her lover.
“I know you were near him at the last, and I think you will do me a great favour because he would wish you to.
“If you can, will you put one of these flowers somewhere near to him — even a tiny blossom, it would comfort me. He gave me this little brooch of white heather, and I would love to have him go on his journey with it from me.”
She was even too miserable to attend O’Higgins’ state funeral, explaining in a letter four days later: “We are not going to Ireland as I have been rather ill, and when the time came I found I could not bear the idea of going there.”
A third letter finds her even more morose. She tells O’Duffy, who was aware of their affair: “I’ve felt frozen in misery and utterly alone. I still feel that to someone, sometime during those hours of shadow, he must have spoken of me — said a word for me — some word I would have known and understood — but I realise the difficulty — there was no one he could tell near him except you perhaps, and you were not alone.
“I find myself looking for his letter every morning — for the past months he has written me practically every day — and then comes that sickening ... of the cruel implacable truth — and the black emptiness of left engulfs me again.”
Lady Lavery, whose image featured on the first Irish bank notes, was also believed to have had an affair with Michael Collins.
The Lavery letters are part of a collection of rare historical Irish items will go up for auction at the ‘A Gathering of All Things Irish Sale’ run by Auctioneers Fonsie Mealy on Tuesday, Jul 23, at the Clyde Court Hotel, Ballsbridge in Dublin.
Among the captivating pieces is the archive of former IRA chief of staff Eoin O’Duffy and rare surviving relics from the Howth Gun Running along with craft works, sports memorabilia and a collection of rare books.
An identification book with more than 200 original photographs and particulars of active criminals in Cork city in the 1940s is also on sale. They include thieves, burglars, fraudsters, and sexual offenders. The Garda Síochána Identification Book for Cork City and County was issued to a Det Garda Madigan.
One lot drawing a lot of attention is a collection of Irish Volunteers uniform brass buttons, which comes complete with an autograph signed covering note to General Eoin O’Duffy from Michael Collin’s sister, Margaret Collins Powell. The note reads: “Please send me a receipt for the enclosed, found in Michael’s tunic pocket, August 22nd 1922”— the day of Collins’s death.
* www.fonsiemealy.ie
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
