Search Results for 'Gregory Autumn Gathering'

Lelia Doolan, the renowned film producer, lecturer, theatre director, and a woman whose energy fizzles if confronted by a cause she feels needs a champion, will launch the 17th Lady Gregory Autumn Gathering on Friday September 23.

In Roy Foster’s impressive biography of WB Yeats* he tells an interesting anecdote concerning the sinking of the RMS Lusitania off the Cork coast on May 7 1915. The Galway writer Violet Martin (the second half of the caustic but amusing Sommerville and Ross duo), was walking by the sea near Castletownshend, Co Cork, when she saw the Lusitania pass in ‘beautiful weather’. Half and hour later, as the ship steamed passed the Old Head of Kinsale on her way to Liverpool, it was torpedoed by a German U-boat. Nearly 2,000 people perished.

TOMORROW, SATURDAY, and Sunday, the fabled Coole Park plays host to the 14th annual Lady Gregory Autumn Gathering which, as ever, features a top-notch array of speakers and performers coming together to celebrate Lady Gregory and her world.

You might think that those at the core of the Irish literary renaissance at the beginning of the 20th century, were one big happy family beavering away in their rooms at Lady Gregory’s home at Coole, Co Galway. In those early days it was a house full of voices and sounds. Sometimes you heard WB Yeats humming the rhythm of a poem he was cobbling together; or the click-clacking of Lady Gregory’s typewriter as she worked on another play for the Abbey. There was the sound of the Gregory grandchildren playing in the garden; the booming voice of George Bernard Shaw, as he complains that he is only allowed to have either butter or jam on his bread, but not both to comply with war rations (He cheated by the way. He put butter on one side of his bread, and when he thought no one was looking, piled jam on the other!); or the voices of the artist Jack Yeats and JM Synge returning from a day messing about on a boat calling out to a shy Sean O’Casey to come out of the library for God’s sake and enjoy the summer afternoon.

I brought her a bag of apples on our first ‘date’. Not very romantic, I hear you say. True. And not very generous. Also true (Tesco special offer – one pound for a ‘family bag’). I was merely continuing a tradition. She was Anne Gregory and during her childhood at Coole Park, “every year John Quinn, Grandma’s great friend in New York, used to send a great case of apples to us.” So it is recorded in Anne’s beautiful book Me and Nu, Childhood at Coole. ‘Nu’ was Anne’s sister, Catherine. If you haven’t read Me and Nu, treat yourself to a copy for the New Year. It is still in print after nearly 40 years.