THE WOLSELEY CAR CLUB OF IRELAND got a great reception when they arrived in Youghal last Saturday 15th August 2012. This spectacular collection of beautifully maintained cars ranging in years from the early 1920′s up to early 1950′s. The cars arrived at the car park near near Nealon’s Quay (beside The Quay’s Bar) at 2pm and were on display until 4pm, after which the vintage cars then headed onto the next stage of the rally.

This was a fantastic opportunity for vintage car enthusiasts and locals alike to view these magnificent cars. While in town the drivers and crews took part in free bus tour of the town with a guided tour and talk by Youghal Town Cryer, Cliff Winser. The group really enjoyed seeing the historic St. Mary’s Collegiate  Church and College Gardens but they all said it was shame they were not able to see Myrtle Grove, the  Elizabethan gabled house (It was home for Sir Walter Raleigh in 1588-1589) as the gates were closed but Cliff Winser was able to show photographs of the famous house and tell the legend that the house is reputed to be where potatoes were first planted in Europe.

Mayor of Youghal, Michelle Hennessy said it was great credit to Sal and Phil Tivy for organising and bringing the Wolseley Car Club Rally to town and hopefully next year they will come back to visit us here in Youghal again. Lesley Murray from Downpatrick in Northern Ireland and driving a 1924 Vauxhall, said it was tremendous fun and his group were having wonderful time.

Clerk of the course, Ian McCulloch, said the competitors had a brilliant time since arriving in town, “The stewards had the place so well organised down by the quayside, listening to the free musicians, the free tour bus and the fabulous food provided by Seamus and Richenda in The Quay’s Bar. I’ve been down here a few times as clerk of the course deciding on which routes for the rally and got great assistance from Sal and Phil Tivy who know the area well, we are well looked after”

Click on the different audio interviews below with the organisers and competitors of the Wolseley Car Club of Ireland visit to Youghal on Saturday 15th August 2012.

Click on image to enlarge – VIDEO OF THIS EVENT WILL BE POSTED HERE SHORTLY

Wonderful Heritage Brochure Reveals Youghal’s Fascinating Past
- By Christy Parker

A NEW SOUVENIR BOOKLET tracing Youghal’s rich heritage is set to inform and delight visitors to the town. For that matter it makes a wonderful reading inducement for locals as well, it being a fair bet that most of us traverse our local streets as oblivious to the historical significance of our surroundings as a bookie to a begging bowl.

Youghal Heritage Trail was researched and written by historian, retired headmaster, marathon cyclist and all round knowledgeable bloke, Kieran Groeger. “The idea for the book arose when representatives from the Youghal 4 All group and the Chamber of Commerce and Tourism tour guide training, particularly with a view to greeting coach tours, some months ago,” Kieran explains. “The Chamber asked me to prepare some scripts and over time it evolved into booklet material that is, I hope, a helpful accompaniment and souvenir for tourists taking the town’s Heritage Walk.” The budget behind the six-week enterprise, he adds, was “precisely nothing but time and effort.”

So much….

The work comprises 28 pages of intriguing facts, legends and anecdotes detailing centuries of deaths, births, marriages, skulduggery, revolt, conspiracies, achievements, tragedies, disasters, treachery, more marriages, slaughter, farce, greed, ambition, failure, yet more murders, unbelievable cruelty, revenge, religion, hope and survival with a cast ranging from nobility to poor, famous to infamous, stranger to invader, traitor to local; our ancestors basically. Youghal, the reader may surmise having read it, has quietened down a lot.

Delivered throughout in a chatty, informal, colloquial style, the wonderfully illustrated booklet leads us from the Market Square (Page 3) through the town and back to the Mall Arts Centre/Town Hall (Page 28) En route we encounter such notable (or notorious) company as Youghal ‘witch’ Florence Newton, Suffragette Anna Haslam, Fr. Peter O’Neill, Walter Raleigh, Cromwell, the Red House ghost, the Quakers, Danny ‘Dúis’ McCarthy, the Boyle family and Shakespeare. Oh, and Pat Lynch of –and because of- Fox’s Lane Museum. They pages pause to consider landmarks like the old Courthouse, St. Mary’s Collegiate Chapel, the Priory, Myrtle Grove, the Town Walls, the Alms Houses and St. Mary’s Catholic Church. The reader further encounters Youghal Lace, the civil war, duels, floggings, hangings and soup kitchens. There are small advertisements too, from times and places long past, to remind us how Youghal once echoed to the quaint and curious.

Gems

Within the generalisations lie gems of beguilement such as these:

•              The Courthouse was built during the Great Famine (there were other, lesser famines too) as part of Relief Works for people to earn money to buy food.

•              Gulliver’s Travels author Dean Swift lived in Youghal occasionally.

•              In 1302 local merchant John Don had his wife’s lover Stephen O’Regan captured and castrated. O’Reagan sued for “loss of yearnings,” won the case and was awarded £20.

•              Youghal nuns and 60 skilled lace makers worked, -in pre-electricity times- for a combined total of 90,020 hours to make the train Coronation dress train for Queen Mary in 1911. It was considered “the most magnificent example of Irish needlepoint lace ever seen.”

•              Floggings took place at the Clock Gate. A whip usually comprised nine pieces of leather with little knots. Following the 1798 rebellion particularly, hundreds, or even thousands, of lashes might be administered, “each pulling a bit of skin off the body.” The screams would echo throughout the town. Women and children were tied to the back of a cart and dragged through the streets and flogged to the beat of a little drummer boy.

•              Two friends, Anthony Watters and Hercules Langrishe fought a duel after arguing over a sugar bowl at breakfast. Watters killed Langrishe but they are buried side by side in St. Mary’s Collegiate Church. Duels took place outside town –at the Ferry Point, Rhincrew and Clifden.

•              In 1709 a Mr Spratt a renowned troublemaker called Mr Spratt was thrown off the town walls and killed while very drunk. Several people were tried for his murder. Two said they would have liked to have killed him but another said he had followed the deceased’s brother for two miles and “would have murdered him too if he had been able to overtake him.” All were acquitted.

•              The Red House ghost is considered a gentle spirit who “leaves people with a sense of well- being and peace.” Occasionally she also allegedly tidies up and lays out people’s clothing for the next day.

•              The Alms Houses doors are so small because Richard Boyle, who had them constructed, wanted people to bow in recognition that they were poor.

•              Boyle was “repulsive, greedy, unbelievably wealthy” and the father of 16 children, some of whom he didn’t see for years on end. He arranged marriages for his daughters from the age of six and had them shipped off to her prospective in-laws!

•              The Quakers meeting house is in Ashe Street near St. Mary’s Catholic Church. One of the Suffragette’s founding members was Youghal-born Quaker Anna Haslam (nee Fisher). Living very nearby was Fr. Keller, a jailed hero who fought the Protestant landlords against unfair rents and won. Keller absolutely loathed suffragettes.

•              William Shakespeare “probably” visited Youghal as his theatre company three times travelled from Bristol to perform here. He was also a friend of Walter Raleigh and of the poet Edmund Spencer, who both lived here. A former harbour Master of Youghal was one Thomas “Shakespere” from Bristol.

•              In 1921, in Youghal: there were five trains running daily to Cork; a ferry every half hour to Ferrypoint; a butter market every Saturday; a livestock market once a month; two picture palaces; 12 hotels; 15 bakers; Hot Sea and Turkish baths at the Mall; War of Independence raids on houses; an IRA bomb that killed seven and injured 25 unarmed bandsmen from the 2nd Hampshire Regiment as they marched down the New Line towards Claycastle.

•              A selection of “Small Ads from Times Past” requests ‘A young Protestant and needle woman of strict honesty, sobriety, good temper and cleanliness’ to mind four children. There is notice given also that Paddy Maher’s “Select” Bar (now the Point) stocked “Only Drinks of the Highest Quality!”

•              On this page too, readers/visitors are urged, “Don’t leave without meeting Bill French (Church Street), local guide and historian. Conducted tours to places of historic interest by appointment.” And that, I suppose is what is called coming full circle.

Youghal Heritage Trail –Souvenir Booklet is available from Cree’s and  Youghal Tourist Office. Price: €4.

Any comments or queries etc. to the author: Dr. Kieran Groeger, M.Ed.
email: kierangroeger@mac.com

YOUGHAL’S HERITAGE TRAIL is part of the East Cork Heritage and Garden Trail and The Trail delves into Youghal’s unique historical past from its origins as a Medieval walled town to its emeregence as a thriving bed of industry and commerce in the 15th and 16th Century and the destruction of many of its finest buildings during The Desmond Rebellion of 1579. 

The Documentary series  follows  the existing route of Youghal’s Heritage walk which is a historic guided tour of Youghal’s olde town,  the first stop being  the site of the exchange dating back to 1672 , Dan then visits such places as The Mall House, The Water Gate, The Clock Gate, Tyntes Castle, Boyles Almshouses,  Myrtle Grove , The College Gardens before finishing up at St Mary’s Catholic Church. Each stop offers a fascinating insight into Youghal’s unique and varied history.

Beautifully produced and presented the series can be heard after the 6 O ‘clock news on Community Radio Youghal every evening from Monday to Thursday on the Youghal@5  programme.

Click on video below to see an interesting archaeological discovery in Church Street,Youghal, filmed by YoughalOnline back in August 2008 – Reporter: Shane Supple | Camera: Kieran McCarthy

Fisherman Tony Varney and his daughter Selina found an 1885 work by US watercolourist Winslow Homer outside a rubbish dump in Ireland in the 1980s. The work had apparently been abandoned. They subsequently learnt it was worth £150,000, and attempted to sell the work at auction in New York in 2009.

After learning of the sale, the painting’s original owners stopped the auction, claiming the work, called Children Under a Palm Tree, was rightfully theirs. Two years on, the two families are still locked in a legal stand-off over the painting’s ownership, and their story can be told in full for the first time.

“I would have willingly sat down and sorted this out,” Ms Varney said. “I just don’t know how long this is going to go on. I am just answering questions they are throwing at us as honestly as I can. I don’t know if they are intending on striking a deal. At the moment it is just going round and round and round.”

She said she was “upset” when Blake’s descendants, who live at the family home in Myrtle Grove, County Cork, stopped the sale, and said the dispute had caused a “lot of heartache, a lot of grief, a lot of money”.

The work shows the three children of Sir Henry Arthur Blake, a British colonial administrator who lived in the Bahamas in the late 19th century. Homer was a guest of the family and painted their children, who were holding a fancy dress party.

The watercolour remained in the family’s ownership, and it travelled with them when they retired to County Cork, Ireland. It is presumed it then remained there for the ensuing decades.

However, mystery still surrounds how the painting managed to find itself outside a rubbish dump in the 1980s. While Blake’s descendants claim it was stolen from their property in Myrtle Grove, they have no record of the crime taking place. Ms Varney and her lawyers argue that since her family found the work, and it remained in their possession for nearly two decades without any claim on its ownership, it now belongs to them.

“There was no crime report, and 20 years after the event it appears the family now realises it was stolen, which puts them in a very interesting legal situation,” said art dealer Philip Mould, one of the presenters of Fake or Fortune?, the BBC programme which will tell the full story of the saga on Sunday.

He added: “If something was deliberately thrown away, that also makes things very complicated. Sotheby’s are currently acting as Solomon, and are waiting for either party to come up with evidence it is theirs.” Mr Mould identified the work on Antiques Roadshow in 2008 and has since followed every development in the family’s tale with interest.

There is also a dispute over the circumstances in which Blake’s descendants stopped the sale. While Sotheby’s claims it contacted them when they first encountered the work, and says they raised no objection, the family says they heard nothing until they saw the auction publicised in the Sotheby’s catalogue. The work now remains in the auction house’s possession in New York.

“I think we would rather keep it,” said Simon Murray, Sir Henry’s great-great-grandson, who is representing his family’s interests. “It is such a special picture. The colours are wonderful. It’s a very significant part of my family’s history and we really want it back.”

Source: Tuesday, 21 June 2011 – By Rob Sharp, Arts Correspondent www.independent.co.uk/

Photos: BBC / Youghalonline / Google image

The Irish Times – Monday, July 4, 2011
MICHAEL PARSONS

NEGOTIATIONS WILL take place in England later this week to try to resolve a protracted dispute about the ownership of a valuable painting linked to an Anglo-Irish family in Cork.
Children Under a Palm , a water colour by the Boston-born artist Winslow Homer (1836-1910), was found in the 1980s in Co Cork by an English tourist, Tony Varney.

The work was among a portfolio of paintings dumped close to a rubbish tip and was discovered by Mr Varney while on a fishing trip on the River Blackwater near Youghal.

Years later, in 2008, Mr Varney and his daughter Selina brought a number of the paintings to the BBC Antiques Roadshow to be valued. Experts there noted the signature of Homer on a watercolour and declared it to be a previously unknown – and very valuable – work by the artist.

A recent programme in the BBC Fake or Fortune ? documentary series outlined how events unfolded when the Varneys decided to consign the painting to auction at Sotheby’s. By May 2009 the painting was up for sale, valued at $150-$250,000 (€103,000-€172,000) at Sotheby’s New York.

But the sale was halted at the last minute when Simon Murray, a barrister and member of a Co Cork Anglo-Irish family, turned up in Manhattan to claim ownership for his family. Efforts to broker a deal between him and the Varneys were unsuccessful and the picture was withdrawn from the auction. The painting has been in legal limbo ever since and remains in the possession of Sotheby’s.

Matthew Weigman, a Sotheby’s director, told The Irish Times that “after two years in which the parties have failed to reach a settlement”, the ownership of the painting “remains unclear as the claimant has provided no information about its whereabouts between the time of his family’s ownership of the picture in the 1880s and its discovery by a relative of Sotheby’s consignor 100 years later”.

The picture was probably painted by Homer in 1885 during a visit to the Bahamas, then a British colony. The governor of the Bahamas from 1884-1887 was Sir Henry Arthur Blake, a Limerick-born British colonial administrator. It is believed the artist was a house-guest who painted Blake’s three children – Olive, Maurice and Arthur -sitting under a palm plant dressed in exotic costumes for a fancy-dress party. Blake later served in Newfoundland and Jamaica and, eventually, as governor of Hong Kong before he and his wife, Lady Edith, eventually retired to Myrtle Grove, a historic house in Youghal, Co Cork.

 

Sir Henry and Lady Edith are buried in the garden at Myrtle Grove which is still owned by their descendents and is today home to Mr Murray’s mother, Shirley.

Mr Murray, a great-great-grandson of Blake, declined to speak to The Irish Times . However, Julian Radcliffe, chairman of the Art Loss Register in London, spoke “on behalf of the family”.

The Art Loss Register is an international company describing itself as “the world’s largest private database of lost and stolen art, antiques and collectables” offering services including “item registration, search and recovery services to collectors, the art trade, insurers and worldwide law enforcement agencies”.

 

Mr Radcliffe said the unframed painting was in a portfolio with other pictures and was stolen from the gate lodge at Myrtle Grove. He said the family did not report its theft to gardaí at the time because, although there had been a couple of minor burglaries at the property, they were unaware that the portfolio was missing.

They were alerted to the New York auction by an article in the Daily Telegraph and contacted Sotheby’s. Gardaí in Youghal have confirmed that “a complaint has been made by the family and is being investigated”.

Mr Radcliffe is meeting lawyers representing the Varney family in England this week and is “hoping to negotiate a settlement which would allow the picture to be returned to Ireland to the legal owner” who would decide whether to keep the painting or sell it.

source: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/0704/1224300034557.html

Tuesday, 28 June 2011 – The legal furore surrounding this watercolour has fascinated BBC viewers, but the story of the family it portrays is even more gripping, says Patrick Cockburn, grandson of the sitter

There sits my grandmother, Olive Blake, as a child at a fancy dress party in the Bahamas in 1885, dressed resplendently as an Arabian princess with scarlet head-dress and broad cummerbund over a yellow dress. A fan, which looks as if it is made from peacock feathers, dangles from her left hand and beside her, dressed as Arabian princes in flowing white trousers, are her younger brothers Maurice and Arthur. No wonder their parents Sir Henry and Lady Edith Blake were pleased by the watercolour of their three children painted by the American artist Winslow Homer.

The picture, for all its troubled recent history – detailed last Sunday evening as part of a major BBC series, Fake or Fortune – has an appealing freshness and spontaneity about it and Olive and her brothers look attractive, without being overly self-conscious of their exotic costumes. There is a certain formality about their expressions and posture, as if they are conscious that their father, Sir Henry, is the governor of the Bahamas. I wonder what Olive or her parents would have made of the controversy now surrounding the re-appearance and contested ownership of this charming painting, well over a century after it was produced.

Did she ever realise that Homer, already well-established when he visited the Bahamas, had gone on to become one of America’s iconic painters who enjoyed immense popularity and some of whose paintings sell today for millions of dollars? I only have a hazy memory of Olive, who died in 1953 when I was aged three, as being a formidable looking woman of whom I was somewhat frightened.

On the other hand, at that age most adults, aside from my parents and nanny, appeared to me to be intimidating and possibly hostile forces.

I remember when I was about three – it must have been shortly before she died – my grandmother took me and my first cousin Shirley in her car to bathe at a beach surrounded by rocks and cliffs called Goat Island near the town of Youghal on the southern Irish coast. Shirley and I both ran fully clothed into sea and were brought back shivering and in disgrace, wrapped in newspapers to Myrtle Grove, a Tudor house behind the medieval walls in Youghal once owned by Sir Walter Raleigh, where she lived.

Sir Henry and Lady Edith had gone to live in Myrtle Grove after he retired as a colonial governor in 1907 and they are buried in the garden. It was a few miles from here, a century after it was painted, that Winslow Homer’s painting was picked up next to a rubbish dump beside Youghal bay by a fisherman called Tony Varney. It was found with some other papers, one of which established a link to Sir Henry’s time as governor of the Bahamas. The finding of the watercolour was in the 1980s and it then disappeared into the attic of Mr Varney’s daughter, Selina, for 20 years, until it was identified on The Antiques Roadshow as being worth £30,000, a figure which, according to experts in New York, is a serious underestimate. They suggest that the painting, which was being auctioned by Sotheby’s, might sell for $250,000, but the sale was stopped at the last moment after objections by descendents of Sir Henry and Edith Blake.

Olive Blake, the central figure in the watercolour, would probably have been taken aback by what has happened.

My mother, Patricia Cockburn, the youngest of Olive’s six children, described her mother as strong-willed, intelligent, interested in the world around her, but highly conventional. As the daughter of a colonial governor, Olive developed a taste for travel and was contemptuous of personal discomfort. She married Jack Arbuthnot, an officer in the Scots Guards and ADC to her father, who was then in his last year as Governor of Hong Kong in 1903. The wedding was a regal affair, with the men in dazzling white uniforms – and her new husband, who liked his creature comforts, had expected the honeymoon would be luxurious.

Instead, Olive insisted they should travel to a remote Buddhist monastery in Japan of which she had read. When they arrived, he discovered they would have to sleep on the floor on straw mats.

The monastery was also overrun by rats. Olive later gleefully told my mother: “You know, Daddy didn’t like it a bit. He had to stay awake all night shooting at them with a revolver.”

Jack Arbuthnot, who for many years supplemented the inadequate pay of an army officer with part time journalism, was the originator of the “Beachcomber” column for the Daily Express. He was also a good amateur painter and sculptor, but quirky and unpredictable. He fought in the First World War and made an original and, to me, very moving relic of his time on the Western Front. On Christmas Day 1914 he collected broken medieval glass from the cathedral at Ypres and reworked the fragments of brown, red, green and clear glass, into a metal cross.

Sir Henry and Lady Edith Blake would probably have been less affected by the strange history of Homer’s picture of their children – something they apparently commissioned on the spur of the moment – because their own lives had been full of high drama.

Staring out from their official portraits in the newspapers of the day in the Bahamas, they look almost like caricatures of coldly remote British rulers at the zenith of the empire. But, in reality, their marriage was the result of an elopement, furiously opposed by Edith’s wealthy Anglo-Irish family, which had disinherited her. On the death of her mother, who had inherited the family estates, Edith and Henry had tried to seize back a house – which she felt was part of her inheritance – at pistol point and were brought before a magistrates’ court.

Edith Blake came from a rich, but dysfunctional family with large estates in Tipperary and Waterford, including extensive copper mines along the coast.

She was the elder of two daughters of Catherine Isabella and Ralph Bernal Osborne, who had come to loathe each other shortly after their marriage in 1844. He was a liberally minded Whig MP, who was originally called Ralph Bernal and appears to have married her largely for her money and resented having to change his name to hers.

An early dispute came when he tried vainly to have all the sheep on her estates in Ireland re-branded with his initials instead of hers.

Relations did not improve over the next 30 years. “The most violent scenes used frequently to take place between my parents,” Edith later wrote. “My sister [Grace] and I often stood holding each other’s hands in the corner, very much frightened. I hated my father and looked upon my mother as a suffering angel.”

Frightened or not, Edith was not an inhibited Victorian girl. She painted extremely well and wrote an excellent book on travelling in southern Europe.

At one moment she complains vigorously about a hotel in Istanbul where she was staying and which had told her there was a public baths next door. In fact, it was some way off and, she notes irritably, that she had to walk to it through the streets of the city wearing only her dressing gown.

Hostilities between her mother and father persisted as Edith grew up. Things were made only slightly more bearable by the fact that he lived mostly in England, while Catherine Isabella stayed at Newtown Anner outside Clonmel in county Tipperary. When he did visit the house she would greet him by saying: “I trust you are well, Mr Osborne, and how did you leave your mistresses?”

When Edith was 16 or 17 her mother wrote a novel called False Positions, published anonymously, which was a thinly-disguised attack on her husband.

Formal separation between Bernal and Catherine Isabella was often mooted but never happened, possibly because relations were too venomous to achieve even this modus vivendi.

Aside from these infuriated rows, the Osbornes were highly educated, painted and drew well and had an early interest in photography. Often the women of the family posed in fancy dress as Italian or Balkan peasants.

Catherine Isabella, presumably ruing her own experience, saw all men who wooed her daughters as potential fortune hunters. Curiously this was almost the only subject on which she and her husband sometimes agreed. When Edith said she intended to marry a good looking and recently widowed police officer called Henry Blake who commanded the Royal Irish Constabulary in the local market town of Clonmel, they adamantly opposed the match.

Briefly united, her parents said he was an adventurer whom they alleged had once been a draper’s assistant in Limerick. When they did marry in 1874, Edith was promptly disinherited and, in true Victorian fashion, her parents forbade her name ever to be mentioned in their house again. The newly-married Blakes were poor, compared to Edith’s previous palatial standard of living. Henry resigned from the police and became a Resident Magistrate, a powerful post with civil and military authority, in central Ireland, just as the war between landlord and tenant was at its height. He was much hated for overseeing evictions, arrests and trials and an open grave was dug outside the Blakes’ house to underline local hostility. Their doors were barred.

A visiting local journalist said that Edith acted as a sort of bodyguard to her husband, adding admiringly “she is always armed, a dead shot with a pistol and practises every day”.

Edith found other uses for her gun. The bitterness between her and her parents remained deep. When her mother died on 21 June 1880, the Blakes took back one of the family houses. But while they were attending her mother’s funeral they found that the agent for the estate had taken advantage of their absence to install his own caretaker. On their return to the house, Henry tried physically to throw the man through the door, while Edith drew a pistol, according to a later court report and shouted: “Look at this – if you don’t go out I will put what’s here through you.” The Blakes never denied that she had drawn a gun and Henry’s lame excuse was that she was could not have shot the caretaker because he was standing in the way and she could not get a clean shot.

The culmination of the family row came the next day in court when Henry was accused of using “force and violence” and Edith of threatening to shoot the caretaker with her gun. The Blakes saw what had happened in a different light. Grace, Edith’s younger sister, had married the Duke of St Albans and they stood to inherit the Osborne estates.

In court Henry, still enraged, somewhat illogically blamed the whole affair on the Duke, saying he wanted to get him sacked as a resident magistrate. He said: “The only one who has an interest in this matter is my noble brother-in-law, the Duke of St Albans, and if he has anything to do with it, I tell him it is an ignoble and discreditable thing for him to bring Mrs Blake here.”

Though should have been an open and shut case, sympathetic local magistrates decided against putting him on trial and the crown did not appeal.

Possibly Blake got off because the beleaguered government in Ireland did not want to lose one of their more effective lieutenants. He also appears to have dropped his and Edith’s claim to the Osborne estates. As well as being a magistrate he was a prolific and eloquent if anonymous journalist with a stark view of Irish politics.

He wrote in 1880 that “there are two Irelands, more clearly defined in religion, feeling and interests than were the Northern and Southern States of America in 1864″.

The New York Times wrote that after a few years as Special Magistrate, with wide authority, that “Blake had made himself so widely hated by the people that he had to be removed from Ireland”. Even so, the pay-off was munificent, probably because the government was in his debt because of active and dangerous service during the land wars, but also because he was now backed by the Duke of St Albans. He was given a knighthood and, after an attempt was balked by the Irish in Australia to make him governor of Queensland, he became governor of the Bahamas in 1884. It was here, months later, that he held the fancy dress party which his children attended in oriental finery and Winslow Homer painted the picture, the ownership of which has created so much controversy.

The Broken Boy, by Patrick Cockburn, is published by Jonathan Cape

source: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/the-girl-in-the-painting-2303618.html