Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

79 auctioned in 2009 realised a disappointing € 2,400 against an estimate of € 3,000-4,000. 127 However highly regarded Gregory was as an artist in his lifetime, and for whatever reasons he was so regarded, judged over time perhaps the DIB ’s modest summation of him as ‘showing some talent’ in this field is the right one. Family man While studying at the Slade, Gregory met Lily Margaret Graham Parry (known as Margaret Parry), a Cheltenham-born fellow student. 128 They later married and had three children: Richard Graham Gregory (1909- 1981); Augusta Anne Gregory, later de Winton (1911-2008); and Catherine Frances Gregory, later Kennedy (1913-2000). The children were brought up largely at Coole by their grandmother, while Robert and Margaret were spending much of their time in Paris. Although the Coole estate passed out of the Gregory family in the 1920s, and the house itself was demolished in 1941, it remained the spiritual home of the family, and in their later years his surviving daughters attended an annual gathering at Coole each autumn in honour of their famous grandmother. Robert’s children, understandably, had few memories of their father; the oldest was only seven when their father went off to war. However, they combined to write a foreword to a centenary tribute published in 1981, 129 in which they say that the incidents and impressions that they have gathered of him over the years confirm, for them, Yeats’ description of him as ‘our perfect man’. Who are we to argue? 130 The only uncertainty in this section relates to the date of Robert and Margaret’s wedding. The DIB gives it as 26 September 1906; all other sources give it as 1907, or more specifically as 26 September 1907. The latter date is confirmed by the UK register of births, marriages and deaths. The marriage was at Paddington; their best man was the Welsh painter and draughtsman Augustus John. After Robert’s early death, Margaret as his sole heir was left in charge of the Coole estate. Her attitude towards it differed from that of her prestigious mother-in-law, which created tensions between them. In September 1928, a year after the house was sold, Margaret married Captain Guy Gough of Lough Cutra, close to Coole, who died in 1959; Margaret herself lived on until 1979, when she died in Exeter aged 94. First World War action Gregory’s ultimately tragic war record, and its literary consequences, 127 Details from www.whytes.ie . To be fair, in 2001 his painting ‘Burren’ realised £11,500 at auction, according to an article on Robert Gregory at www.pgil-eirdata.org . 128 Margaret was of American extraction; some sources incorrectly give her place of birth as Cobham, Virginia. 129 Robert Gregory 1881-1918: A Centenary Tribute (edited and published by Colin Smythe, 1981) 130 However, an essay by James Pethica, ‘Yeats’s Perfect Man’, published in the Dublin Review No.35 in summer 2009, casts serious doubt on this description of Gregory. In the Wickets