Patrick Comerford
When Lady Louisa Isabella Georgina FitzGibbon (1826-1898) was forced to sell off the Mountshannon Estate near Castleconnell, Co Limerick, in 1890s, and eventually died a lonely death in seclusion in a convent on the Isle of Wight in 1898, many people thought that the FitzGibbons of Mountshannon had come to an end.
This notion is reinforced in many of the accounts of the family history, and these perceptions are reinforced by the inscription on the roadside monument at Lisnary, near Castleconnell, to her eldest son, Charles Richard George Dillon (1849-1870), who died of blood poisoning at the age of 20.
However, Lady Louisa has a large number of living descendants, some of whom believed they were entitled to claim the Fitzgibbon title of Earl of Clare. As I researched the family story following my visit to Castleconnell at the weekend, I came across some interesting links between the Fitzgibbon family and The Irish Times, with an earlier family of Earls of Lichfield, and with a prominent family of Roman Catholics in Staffordshire.
Lady Louisa was born in 1826. When her father, Richard Hobart FitzGibbon (1793-1864), 3rd Earl of Clare, died in 1864, there was no surviving son or male heir to inherit the family titles and estates, and Lady Louisa inherited Mountshannon. By then, she had been married to the Hon Gerald Normanby FitzGibbon, youngest son of Henry Augustus Dillon-Lee, 13th Viscount Dillon, since 1847.
The Dillons were an old Irish family who managed to hold onto their family titles and estates despite having supported James II and despite many family members joining the Irish Jacobites in exile in France, and when they returned to Ireland many were MPs for Co Mayo.
The Dillon name was joined to the Lee name when Henry Dillon (1705-1787) married Lady Charlotte Lee, the niece and heiress of Robert Lee (1706-1766) at a time when the Lee line linked with Lichfield was about to die out.
The title of Earl of Lichfield title had come into the Lee family in 1674 when Edward Henry Lee (1663-1719) was merely an 11-year-old: he was promised to marriage to Lady Charlotte Fitzroy, one of the many illegitimate children of Charles II and his mistress Barbara Villiers: the two children were married to each other in 1674.
At times, family members used the name Lee-Dillon, at other times they called themselves Dillon-Lee, and the constant changes have confused genealogists throughout the generations.
The Dillons also intermarried with the Jerningham-Stafford family, and Lady Louisa’s husband, Gerald Lee-Dillon, was a second cousin of Sir Henry Valentine Jerningham-Stafford, 9th Lord Stafford, and of Edward Jerningham-Stafford, who married Marianne Smythe, the adopted daughter of Mrs Fitzherbert who had married George IV in an illicit marriage.
Although Gerald Lee-Dillon was the fifth son and ninth child of the 13th Viscount Dillon, it was not beyond possibility that he or his sons might eventually inherit the Dillon family: three of his brothers were successively the 14th, 15th and 16th viscounts. Nevertheless, at Christmas 1873, 26 years after their marriage and nine years after the death of Lady Louisa’s father, Gerald changed his name legally to Fitzgibbon, and over the next few generations their children, grandchildren and great-children moved between both sets of surnames.
Gerald died in 1880, and two years later Louisa married General Carmelo Ascene Spadafora, Marchese della Rochella, in 1882. But she continued to call herself Lady Louisa Fitzgibbon, even when she was widowed a second time, when she was forced to sell off Mountshannon, and until she died a lonely, isolated death in a convent in 1898.
The constant name changes continued to confuse successive generations of her descendants. Their youngest son, Louis Theobald Fitzgibbon (1859-1913), was the father of Robert Francis Lee-Dillon (1884-1954), who was born with the Fitzgibbon name but changed his name to Lee-Dillon in 1924.
One of his sons was Robert Louis Lee-Dillon Fitzgibbon, better known as the writer Constantine Fitzgibbon (1919-1983). Although born in the US, he has also been regarded as British and Irish, and spent his final days in Dalkey, Co Dublin. He was the author of When the Kissing Had to Stop, a controversial 1960 novel written to undermine the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
Constantine Fitzgibbon’s half-brother, Louis Theobald Dillon Fitzgibbon (1925-2003), was born Louis Theobald Dillon Lee-Dillon, and added to the genealogical confusion when he changed his surname by deed poll in 1962.
The brothers compounded the confusion by claiming they were heirs to the title of Earl of Clare as descendants of Lady Louisa’s brother, John Charles Henry Fitzgibbon (1829-1854), Viscount Fitzgibbon, who was killed at the Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava.
For 15 years, Constantine Fitzgibbon was married to the food writer Theodora Fitzgibbon (1916-1990), who continued to write under the name Theodora Fitzgibbon after they divorced and she married the photographer George Morrison. I worked with both Theodora Fitzgibbon and Maeve Binchy at The Irish Times.
Maeve Binchy was once the Women’s Editor in The Irish Times, which in hindsight she regarded as ‘an unusual choice: I knew nothing at all about cookery or fashion.’ She first asked Theodora Fitzgibbon to write about cookery and food for The Irish Times.
Theodora once sent a recipe for veal dishes and Maeve thought searched her files for a photograph of a casserole dish with many knives and forks sticking out of it. She typed a caption, ‘Tasty Veal Casserole, excellent for a winter evening.’ She sent the page to print and went home.
‘That evening, watching the television news, I saw an item about Dr Christiaan Barnard, and my blood ran cold. I knew now where I had seen that picture before. It was not a casserole. It was open heart surgery. What I had thought was a knife and fork was in fact a clamp and forceps.
‘My father was a lawyer. “Admit nothing,” he advised But I had to admit something. I phoned the Editor and asked him to hold the Cookery Page.’
Douglas Gageby ‘was low browed with anger,’ she recalled, ‘breathless, in the newspaper office to help sort it out.’
‘We’ll be the first newspaper to be prosecuted for cannibalism,’ he told Maeve.
‘We were down to minutes now,’ Maeve’s recollections continue. ‘I had to find a picture of the same size and shape and write a caption. I found a picture of a china egg-cup and egg. ‘Why be content with a boiled egg on a winter’s evening,’ she typed, ‘when you could have a Veal Casserole?.’
‘Theodora telephoned the next morning. “You didn’t actually kill yourself, darling,” she said. She agreed later that I almost had killed myself – and dined out often on the tale.’
