The Vandeleur Family (Wardenstown) Papers

“…I know he is not at all good looking, but he is a big kind-hearted sporting sort of happy go lucky Irishman…His place is about 12 or 13 miles from Mullingar and is called Wardenstown. He has described it as old to me and very tumbledown, or at least out of repair at present. But the garden is nice, and he says I may have a free hand and make alterations that he can pay for (when the war is over!). We shall be very poor but shall have horses and be able to hunt and he is very keen on all sports – shooting, fishing, hunting, and steeple chasing, and we shall get lots of all that…the sad thing is that the war seems very steady at present…” – Ruth Sidney Layard to her aunt Honoria Hayes, July 1915 (NLI, Vandeleur Papers, MS 51,572/96/4)

Landed estates are almost archival institutions in themselves. The business of managing an estate led to the creation of various records such as maps, rentals and administrative papers relating to the property. If we are lucky, the estate papers may be supplemented by family and personal papers such as correspondence, scrapbooks and diaries. The above was taken from a letter from Ruth Sidney Layard (1887-1975) to an aunt in Gloucestershire, England, in July 1915. Ruth was then aged 28 and working as a nurse in a field hospital in France with the British Expeditionary Force. Upon her return from the war, she married the man in question, Crofton Talbot Bayly Vandeleur (1881-1927), Lieutenant in the North Somerset Yeomanry. Ruth then moved to Wardenstown House in County Westmeath.

This was the twilight period of Ireland’s Ascendency class, as hinted at by Crofton’s financial status. Not long after their return from the War, there came the gradual sale of parcels of land on the Wardenstown estate. This reflected the situation that many landlords across Ireland found themselves in following the Land Acts of the decades previous which, no doubt, accelerated what was the long demise of the Big House in Ireland. All is captured in the legal and financial papers, the annotated Ordnance Survey maps of the Westmeath estate, and various other items such as correspondence found in the Vandeleur Papers recently catalogued and available for consultation at the National Library of Ireland.

With family connections to Lords Avonmore and the Knights of Kerry, the collection also includes material relating to the extended Vandeleur family including the Bayly, Croasdaile, Hayes and Yelverton families, spanning from the seventeenth century right through to the twentieth. Some papers of the Reverend William Falkiner concerning Westmeath local history also made their way into the hands of the Vandeleur family. A highlight of the collection is the Layard papers, particularly material relating to Ruth’s aunt, the poet and Antiquarian Nina Francis Layard (1853-1935). Nina was somewhat of a pioneer in that she was among the first women elected as Fellows to the Society of Antiquaries of London. A series of diaries document her travels around England, Scotland, Ireland and further afield with her partner, Mary Frances Outram. The diaries are an invaluable source on archaeology, antiquarianism, and women’s history at the turn of the century and they greatly complement Nina’s academic works and a selection of her letters that are also found in the collection.

Although landed estate archives have their limitations in that they mostly focus on the middling to upper strands in Irish society, for the student of local history, there is much to be gleaned, just as there is for those studying landed estates and the landlord class in Ireland. The array of material within the Vandeleur Papers, from leases and deeds to family scrapbooks relating to the First and Second World Wars exemplifies the value of such collections. Thus, the Vandeleur Papers are a welcome reminder that landed estate records can be an invaluable resource. Their reach often goes beyond the boundaries of the estate, presenting opportunities for new perspectives on Ireland’s past.