Laments for Lady Lavery’s lover up for auction

A rogue’s gallery of 1940s Cork criminals and a lament for her revolutionary Irish lover by the wife of a British peer are among an eclectic gathering of memorabilia to be auctioned in Dublin this month.

“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.