FROM THE ARCHIVES:Caroline Walsh met the elderly daughters of songwriter and artist Percy French when they visited Dublin in 1982. – JOE JOYCE
PERCY FRENCH’S daughters Ettie and Joan were in their element yesterday as, over afternoon tea in Greystones, Co Wicklow, they reminisced about the high-jinks of their youth.
“I remember most the things we did for fun together, like the dressing up suppers on Sunday evenings. It was just the family and a very good black-and-white artist called Hubert Lesley who was in lodgings round the corner,” said Joan ]
The sisters, who normally live in Suffolk, are in Ireland to help celebrate the birthday of a cousin in Ballinrobe, Co Mayo, this week-end but also hope to look in at an exhibition in the Oriel Gallery, Dublin, of over 50 of their father’s watercolours, which were formerly in their own private collection.
Altogether they are only staying six days in the country. “You see, most of our friends are getting a little aged so we tend to go and see them all for about two minutes every year and fit in as many as we can,” said Joan, who at 79 isn’t at all coy about disclosing her age. Neither is Ettie, who is 87.
After school they and their late sister Molly went to the Royal Academy of Music, after which Joan taught elocution.
Ettie had more trouble summing up her career. “I don’t think I’ve ever been able to describe myself as anything except maybe a spinster or odd jobist.”
None of the three sisters married. “We were just quite content as we were.
“My mother lived till she was 88, and it was a very nice home and we’d no desire to leave it,” said Joan, while Ettie thought the Great War had something to do with it.
“After the first World War, when Molly and I were marriageable, there were few young men around.
“Millions of them had just been killed and a great many girls of our age didn’t marry for that reason.”
During that war their father went on a trip to entertain the troops, and one of his most haunting pictures, “Ghost of Ypres”, conjures up that period of his life.
“We don’t know much about it because it was all hush-hush. I don’t think he was allowed say exactly where he was, and anyway he was a peace-loving person who didn’t like any kind of argument. Because it was all so horrible.
“I think he just preferred not to talk about it. He made slides in the garden for us instead,” said Joan.
Because of this side of him they are both glad he died before the Civil War in Ireland. “I’m glad he died when he did [January 1920] because he would have been so broken-hearted at the Troubles. He could never have lived with the thought of Ireland at war with itself.
“He would have hated partition, because he had as many friends in the North as he did in the South. It was all the same to him.”
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