May Countess of Limerick

Finally, in 1917 the tenancy was let to May, Countess of Limerick, who like other members of the Irish aristocracy had found it expedient to quit her native land. Born in 1862, the daughter of Joseph Burke Irwin, an Irish Resident Magistrate, May Irwin was considered a great beauty when in 1890 she married William, Viscount Glentworth, heir to the Earldom of Limerick. He succeeded to the title in 1894 and the couple lived at the family's ancestral seat, Dromore Castle, County Limerick, where her son, Edward, Viscount Glentworth, was born in 1895. He was killed in action in 1918 and in the same year the Countess lost her daughter, Victoria May, wife of the American financier, James Cox Brady, who died in America in the influenza epidemic. By this time the Countess was living apart from her husband, who continued to live at Dromore Castle until his death in 1929.1 She restored the fabric of Hall Place and furnished it with a magnificent collection of antiques. The layout of the house was by now much changed from the time of the Champneys and the Austens. The Parlour had become the Large Dining Room; the Bedroom, a Drawing Room; the Kitchen, a Ball Room; and the Buttery, a Dining Room. The Great Hall was still the Great Hall and the Chapel, the Chapel. Around the Jacobean Courtyard, a series of offices on the East Side faced the Kitchen and small Dining Room on the West.

On the upper floor, there were by 1943 a total of twelve bedrooms, a bathroom and cloak room, not to mention the five or more ghosts sensed by the psychic Countess. In 1926 her son-in-law, the American millionaire, James Cox Brady bought the house from the Dashwoods, who had been anxious to sell for some time. However, nine years later following Mr Brady's death, his trustees sold the house and 62 acres of land to Bexley Council for £25,000, subject to a life tenancy granted to Lady Limerick. It was understood that on her death the contents of the house would also be left to the Council. Yet fate intervened. Moved by the destruction of Coventry in 1940, the old Countess changed her Will, and arranged that on her death her collection should be sold and the sum raised be used to help restore that city's ancient cathedral. This happened in 1943 and in a sale held over nine days, £27,800 was duly raised for the rebuilding fund.

It is perhaps ironic that by this twist of fate or by the strange workings of Divine Providence the house of Sir John Champneys, built with the stones of the ruined monasteries and endowed thereby with the wealth of the dispossessed religious, should itself be thus laid bare to rebuild a new, the great, solemn and stately Abbey and Cathedral Church at Coventry.