Every day’s a school day. As recently as yesterday, I had never heard of Nancy Spain except in the great Irish ballad of that name, usually sung by Christy Moore (including once, in an amped-up punk version with Moving Hearts). If you’d told me then there was a real-life Nancy, I’d have guessed she was one of the Spains of Limerick or Tipperary, where the surname has a presence.
Then I found myself reading the diaries of Evelyn Waugh, where the actual Nancy Spain (1917–1964) makes a dramatic appearance. And as I now realise, she was an English tabloid journalist and broadcaster, best known for a column in the Daily Express.
So far, I can’t find evidence that she visited Ireland, unlike the heroine of the ballad, who “left these shores” with the lovelorn narrator’s ring. Either way, he would have been barking up the wrong tree there. Although Spain did have a secret son from a brief heterosexual affair, she was a lifelong lesbian, whose lovers included Marlene Dietrich.
Her fraught encounter with Waugh was in 1955 when she tried to visit him at his stately home in Gloucestershire, Piers Court. He was at the height of his fame then, but on the slide, physically, mentally and artistically. The huge success of Brideshead Revisited was a decade behind. He had since fallen out of fashion, was short of money and his many ailments included hearing voices, a condition eventually controlled by medication.
In her account of the trip for the Daily Express, Spain described filling in her travelling companion, one Lord Noel-Buxton, about who they were visiting: “I said that Evelyn Waugh used to be a bright young thing who wrote bright young novels with names like Vile Bodies and Black Mischief and we all loved them.”
But in Vile Bodies and the later Scoop, Waugh had satirised the Express and its proprietor Lord Beaverbrook. His perception that the newspaper group was now out for revenge would not have been diminished by Spain’s review of his 1953 novel Love Among the Ruins, in which she claimed (as summarised on the Waugh Society website), that she had “yawned her way through it in half an hour”.
[ An insight into Limerick-born actor Richard Harris’s lesser known lifeOpens in new window ]
This and general paranoia explained the sign that greeted Spain and Noel-Buxton on their approach to Waugh’s house: “No Admittance on Business.” Undaunted, they introduced themselves to the woman who answered the door, whereupon a voice from inside called: “Tell them to go away.”
An animated Waugh followed up with “Go away, go away! You read the notice, didn’t you? No admittance on business?” This provoked indignation from the aristocratic visitor, who protested: “I’m not on business. I’m a member of the House of Lords.” But when Waugh followed their retreating car, it was not to apologise, as the peer assumed, it was to shut the gates.
Spain made the most of the brief encounter in her write-up. Waugh’s account was shorter but deeply felt. His diary entry for June 21st, 1955 notes: “…a hullabaloo at the front door. Miss Spain and Lord Noel-Buxton were there trying to force an entry. I sent them away and remained tremulous with rage all the evening.”
This was followed by a four-word entry on June 22nd: “And all next day.” But the visit didn’t just annoy him. It provoked him to move out of “polluted” Piers Court soon afterwards.
At least in Ireland, the surname Spain usually derives from the eponymous country. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Family Names of Ireland, it occurs mainly in Tipperary and Offaly, and was a descriptive addition in former centuries for returning emigrants, which later supplanted their original surnames.
On a tangential note, the man who wrote the ballad, Barney Rushe, was a Dubliner who spent his later years in Malaga but died on a visit home in 2014. And it seems the unrequited love of his song was real but could not be identified. Hence the accidental immortality in Irish folk music of an English journalist, by whose name Rushe was lyrically “haunted”.
It may have been accidental in more ways than one. A celebrity in her lifetime, Spain made widespread headlines with the manner of her death, in a light-aircraft crash, with her long-time partner Joan Werner Laurie, on the way to the 1964 English Grand National. Among those bereft was Noel Coward, who lamented: “It is cruel that all that gaiety, intelligence and vitality should be snuffed out when so many bores and horrors are left living.”
Rushe’s song was one of two he gave Christy Moore when they met in 1969, the other being The Crack Was Ninety (in the Isle of Man). A bit like Spain, who was from Newcastle, the word crack had been born in the north of England and was still so spelt on both sides of the Irish Sea then. But it too was fated to earn honorary Irish citizenship. It moved to Galway sometime in the 1970s, went native, and is now known as “craic”, even in England.
[ Frank McNally on a belated first visit to Knock Airport, 40 years onOpens in new window ]
