[Deathwatch] Lord Oranmore and Browne, member of the House of Lords, 100

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Lord Oranmore and Browne
(Filed: 10/08/2002) 

The 4th Lord Oranmore and Browne, who has died aged 100, is believed to
hold the record as the longest-serving member of the House of Lords,
having taken his seat in 1927 and been evicted under the Government's
reforms of 1999.

He earned the unspoken admiration of many by never speaking in the
chamber, and was better known for his three marriages, particularly to
the heiress Oonagh Guinness and to the actress Sally Gray.

It was also his misfortune to be associated in the public memory with
the tragic deaths in traffic accidents of first his parents in 1927,
and then of his son Tara Browne, an icon of the Swinging Sixties,
almost 40 years later.

Dominick Geoffrey Edward Browne was born in Dublin on October 21 1901,
heir to the Irish peerages of Oranmore and Browne of Carrabrowne
Castle, Co Galway, and Castle Mac Garrett, Co Mayo.

He was descended from a mayor and MP for Galway who was knighted in
1635 but lost most of his lands to Cromwell's insurgents; an MP and
Middle Temple barrister in the next generation retrieved the 2,000
acres after the Restoration of Charles II. The first Lord Oranmore and
Browne was a 19th-century Whig MP who rebuilt Castle Mac Garrett, and
the second an Irish representative peer in the Lords. The third was an
Irish senator and one of the last knights of the Order of St Patrick,
who was given the United Kingdom barony of Mereworth, which carried the
right to sit in the Lords.

Young Dominick divided his early years between Castle Mac Garrett,
which was set in 3,000 acres containing some of the oldest trees in
Ireland, Mereworth Castle in Kent, and London. He was the youngest page
at the coronation of King George V, and sent to Eton. His return from
Castle Mac Garrett for the summer half of 1916 was delayed because of
the Easter Rebellion. After Christ Church, Oxford, he served briefly in
the Grenadier Guards, earning a reputation as a fine shot.

When his parents were involved in their accident at Southborough, Kent,
in 1927 Dominick knew that peers were supposed to be buried in lead
coffins. He therefore ordered one from a local undertaker, whose men
managed to get it upstairs to receive the body. Unfortunately, they
found it too heavy to carry downstairs and put it into a service lift;
the ropes broke, sending the casket crashing through the basement. On
the death of his mother two days later, the hearse with her coffin
caught fire, and another vehicle had to be ordered.

In 1930 Oranmore and Browne sold the Mereworth estate and concentrated
on running Castle Mac Garrett, which had been spared from being razed
during the Troubles because it was occupied by the Free State Army
before being returned to the family. This gave him a chance to take up
flying, practising on a twin-engined Cutty-Sark machine which could
alight on land or water.

But with an estate that had a staff of 150 there was always trouble
making ends meet. In 1933, Oranmore and Browne was involved in a rates
dispute, in which a collector briefly seized some cattle. Two years
later a serious fire broke out in the castle. Oranmore and Browne
headed a party of local farmers and peasants who formed a human chain
to carry buckets of water from the nearby river Roe, but furniture,
paintings and other possessions were destroyed. In 1939, Oranmore and
Browne tried to join the British Army, but he was told that, at 38, he
would be more useful concentrating on farming; as a result his war
service was with the Local Defence Force in Co Mayo.

The castle was known for its shooting and fishing, and Oranmore and
Browne also showed tourists around himself, at five shillings a time.
By 1961, he could no longer afford to live there. In a last ditch
attempt to hang on, he conceived a scheme of "arm-chair farming", which
involved moving pigs into the castle, and rearing them in the drawing
rooms and boudoirs. The idea was that a sow reared in such a setting
would command about 90 guineas on the market, a profit of about £55.
"Not a bad investment," commented Oranmore and Browne's nephew, Michael
Mordaunt-Smith, who was masterminding operations.

Oranmore and Browne had high hopes that this would attract swarms of
American pig owners to the castle to inspect developments. But not long
afterwards, the castle was compulsorily taken over by the Land
Commission, which sold it to become a home for the elderly.

Oranmore and Browne married three times, first Mildred Helen, daughter
of Thomas Egerton, a cousin of the Duke of Sutherland; they had two
sons and three daughters (one of whom died aged 13). They divorced in
1936, so he could marry Oonagh Guinness, one of the "Golden Guinness
girls"; she was a considerable heiress in her own right and the owner
of Luggala, a fairytale Gothic lodge in the Wicklow mountains.

They had three sons, the eldest of whom is Garech Browne, the
pony-tailed squire of Luggala, a guardian of Irish lore and founder of
The Chieftains. The second son died after a week. The third was Tara
Browne, a friend of John Lennon who drove his Lotus Elan into a
lamp-post in Redcliffe Square, London, in 1966. Tara was the subject of
the Beatles' song A Day in the Life, which contained the verse:

He blew his mind out in a car
He didn't notice that the lights had changed
A crowd of people stood and stared
They'd seen his face before,
Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords.

After divorcing Oonagh in 1950, Oranmore and Browne married Constance
Vera Stevens, the actress Sally Gray who had been trained as a dancer
by Fred Astaire and starred in the films Dangerous Moonlight (1940) and
Green for Danger (1946). The marriage remained a secret until the
couple attended the Coronation in 1953.

Oranmore and Browne retained clear memories to the end. When he
recently received a letter about a local church, he recalled his
father's story of the incumbent with a lisp who used to end his
sermons, "God shave the Queen".

His 100th birthday was celebrated with a family party at the Ritz. He
was glad to receive a telegram from the President of Ireland, but
disappointed by the card from the Queen, which had a large photograph
of her on the front and seemed to him undignified. "Horrible," he
muttered as he stuffed it back into the envelope. After reading the
Telegraph's obituary of the screenwriter Ivan Moffat last Saturday, he
remarked: "Everyone seems to be dead."

Lord Oranmore and Browne, who died on Thursday, is succeeded as 5th
baron by his eldest son, the poet Dominick Browne, who was born in
1927.