Did the Irish broadcaster and writer Frank Delaney have his way with the “witty, wicked and wonderful” Princess Margaret, younger sister of Queen Elizabeth , as a new book suggests? Or could it merely be the ungallant boasting of the four-times married, posh-talking Tipperary man, described by the NPR radio network in the U S, where he went to live in 2002, as “the most eloquent man in the world”.
he princess was lured into a night of passion in his London flat by Delaney’s soft-toned, emotional rendition of the James Clarence Mangan poem, Dark Rosaleen, on BBC radio. But after recounting the encounter, in lurid detail, the critic and writer John Walsh appears to suffer from a form of coitus interruptus himself.
“I never established if the story was true,” he says in his recently published memoir, Circus of Dreams. “The princess was certainly known to have a thing about Irishmen. And Delaney was a torrential charmer of middle-aged women.”
Maybe this affection for Irishmen was ignited when she became the first royal to visit Ireland since independence, six months after her marriage, on May 6, 1960, to Antony Armstrong-Jones, whose mother was the Countess of Rosse, chatelaine of Birr Castle, Co Offaly.
The princess and her new husband spent New Year’s in Birr, setting off a hilarious media firestorm. In the course of ringing to see how her sister was getting on, Queen Elizabeth was put through to Birr 32, the bar of Dooley’s Hotel in the town, instead of Birr 23, which was Birr Castle, the seat of Lord Rosse, where her sister was in residence.
At the time, the bar was overwhelmed by thirsty reporters, and on the Queen’s second attempt the phone was answered by Seamus Brady, a well-known Dublin-based reporter with the Daily Express. Scoops all round, printed and pinted.
The entire debacle was something that would surely have amused the princess, who was reported to have told the writer Jean Cocteau: “Disobedience is my joy.”
Anther English writer, Craig Brown, said in his book, Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, that everyone seems to have met her: “She shows up without warning, popping her head around the door of every other memoir, biography and diary written in the second half of the 20th century — usually to insult her hostess or use someone’s hand as an ashtray.”
We don’t know what Delaney called her during their encounter, but according to Brown the princess insisted that her lovers address her as “Your Royal Highness”.
Delaney was every English upper-class person’s idea of what a real Irishman should be: good-looking, charming, humorous, well-read and lacking ego without being deferential.
“Women fell for him like pheasants at a Windsor shoot,” writes Walsh, a London-born literary lion of Irish parentage.
The story, as told to him by Delaney, begins when he was introduced to Princess Margaret at a party in Broadcasting House, the BBC’s London headquarters. She told him of her love of Irish poetry and inquired if he knew Dark Rosaleen.
Delaney came from the village of Thomastown in Co Tipperary, a village on the road from Cashel to Tipperary town. He was the youngest of eight children, born in 1942 to two local school teachers and educated by the Christian Brothers.
Maybe it was his schooling, but like other Tipperarymen who got on in life — former EU Commissioner Dick Burke and founder of Ryanair Tony Ryan come to mind — he favoured a pronounced posh brogue, and he knew Rosaleen by heart from his school days.
Like Terry Wogan and the actor TP McKenna, he started life as a bank clerk. He said later, when overtaken by fame, that he had failed his Leaving Cert. But whatever else, what Frank did not lack was confidence in his own abilities.
He eventually arrived in Dublin, by this time married to Eilish Kelliher (1966) and the father of three sons, Frank, Bryan and Owen.
He left the Bank of Ireland in 1972 and pursued a variety of occupations, including a stint as a continuity announcer and sometimes news reader with Radio Éireann.
Living in the suburbs of south Dublin, one of his neighbours, Pat Quigley, was the newly appointed sports editor of the Sunday World newspaper, launched in 1973.
After Delaney expressed an interest in writing a column for the paper, he met with the editors and pitched the idea of a gossipy business column, which would appear under the byline “The Chairman”.
He was engaged and was remembered in the corridors of the World’s offices, then in Terenure, for dropping in and “charming the pants off” the female staff, and coming up with hare-brained marketing ideas.
He also established a following for the name-dropping column, which labelled prominent business figures with nick-names — “The Golden Boy” in the case of Tony O’Reilly and Stephen “Wheels” O’Flaherty for the founder of the Irish Volkswagen franchise.
But Dublin couldn’t contain his work rate and ambition and he was soon in London working for the BBC World Service and Radio 4. It was there, in 1978, that he created the award-winning radio programme, Bookshelf.
“Better known in Britain than in Ireland because of his BBC work,” say the authors of Modern Irish Lives. “He is [was] an outspoken critic of early 20th century Ireland’s restrictive social and moral attitudes.”
Over the next five years he interviewed countless writers, including John Updike, Stephen King, Christopher Isherwood, Anthony Burgess and many others.
He also wrote James Joyce’s Odyssey: A Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses (1981), never minding that he had previously described the book as “unreadable”.
When challenged about this apparent contradiction, he retorted: “No one hates a populariser more than an intellectual.” He was a judge of the Booker Prize in 1982, which was awarded to Thomas Keneally for Schindler’s Ark.
It was around this time, according to Walsh’s account, that he had the encounter with Princess Margaret, who told him she never missed his Poetry Please radio programme, which was broadcast on a Sunday night and replayed the following Saturday night.
When they dined together in a fashionable London restaurant, Delaney told Walsh, Princess Margaret then enquired if he would read Dark Rosaleen, a rebellious Irish poem, known as an “aisling”, on his radio show, “as a special favour to me”.
This he duly did the following Sunday, afterwards expecting some form of royal acknowledgement, which never came. But the following Saturday evening, after the programme was rebroadcast, the phone rang in his flat, and the princess was on the other end of the line, telling him how pleased she was and that he had read it “beautifully”.
The following is the version then given by Delaney to Walsh and recounted in Circus of Dreams.
“‘I think we should meet’, she [Princess Margaret] said. ‘Will you come to me or shall I come to you?’
“‘It might be better if you were to come here’, he replied, and 40 minutes later her chauffeur deposited her at his Hammersmith flat.
“‘She stayed until Monday morning’, he said in a dazed voice. ‘John! I saw her eatin’ corn flakes’.
“‘Did you actually fancy her, though’, I asked, as though this were a perfectly normal conversation. After all, she is about 10 years older than you [12 years to be exact].
“‘Oh God, yeah’, he said. ‘Her skin was so soft’.
“‘Just out of interest’, I said. ‘Did it turn you on, being an Irishman reading a nationalist poem about Irish rebellion to the sister of the Queen of England, and then having her come round to have sex with you?’
“‘That didn’t cross my mind’, he said. ‘I was just amazed at what was happening’.”
Walsh says he can find no record of Dark Rosaleen in the index of Poetry Please.
“But the story was so detailed, his report on the princess’s fascination for the poem so plausible, I can’t help hoping it might have been so,” he concludes.
In 1988, Delaney, then famous for his TV series The Celts, married Susan Collier. After they divorced, he “briefly” married novelist Salley Vickers, in 1999. They were divorced in 2002, just as she was becoming quite famous as a writer in her own right. Delaney kept right on moving, arriving in the US and settling in Kent, Connecticut, where he married Diane Meier in September the same year.
He was a prolific author with a vast output of fiction and non-fiction and podcasts. His fourth wife ran a successful strategic advisory business and they wrote a screenplay together, based on his book Telling the Pictures (1993).
Francis James Joseph Raphael Delaney — his eyes rolled in his head when anyone addressed him by his full name — died on February 21, 2017, at the age of 75, due to complications caused by a stroke.
Regardless of what happened with Delaney, for much of her life Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, maintained a strong and personal connection with Tipperary and Ireland through her friendship with Ned Ryan, from the village of Upperchurch, who was described as “a mainstay of the princess’s life, a fixture at shooting parties at Windsor and holidays in the Caribbean and the south of France”. She survived the ups and downs of a turbulent life, until her death in 2002 at the age of 72.
Circus of Dreams: Adventures in the 1980s Literary World by John Walsh is published by Constable
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