Michael Collins and a Passionate Romance

So, did Michael Collins have an affair with the beautiful Lady Lavery while he was negotiating the Anglo-Irish Treaty in London in 1921?

The latest intelligence is – no. In her new study of Michael Collins and “The Women Who Spied for Ireland”, Meda Ryan concludes that no carnal knowledge took place.

The IRA would have shot Hazel, anyway, if they found out that she was sleeping with Mick. Not him, mind. Her.

Blame the woman. Good old Irish Republican tradition. They didn’t approve of that mullarkey anyway. Killing was OK. But fornication is a sin.

I am sure, however, that Meda Ryan, who has written several well-researched studies of Michael Collins, is right in her conclusions. You sense these things.

But I feel sure, by the same token, that Peter Hart, in his disparaging recent biography, Mick, is wrong in suggesting that Collins visited prostitutes.

My intuition says not - not for prudish or judgemental reasons, but because it doesn’t add up to the man’s character or background. My feeling is that Collins was an uxorious type of man.

However, although the romance between Hazel Lavery and Michael Collins was not consummated, it was nonetheless, at least on her side, a most passionate romance.

Maybe all the more passionate and romantic because it wasn’t consummated. Many great historical love stories are about passion denied. I know it’s hard to imagine this in the age of the casual bonk, but European romantic literature is much more about yearning than shagging (to use the current vernacular).

Hazel Lavery was utterly smitten by Michael Collins, and had been, since she had first met him in London in 1914, at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square. He was a 24-year-old post office clerk: she was the 34-year-old wife of London’s most fashionable painter, Sir John Lavery, for whom the King and Queen (George V and Mary) sat. She was also a considerable artist herself.

It really is demeaning Hazel to describe her – as she is sometimes - as a “society queen”. She was a gifted woman and, of course, an unforgettable beauty who for many years adorned the Irish pound £ as the perfect “colleen”. Hazel was American-born, but her family were the Martyns of Galway.

Sadly, her talent as a painter was subsumed into her husband’s, the Belfast-born Sir John. She was far from being a feminist, and she felt that since hers was the lesser talent, she shouldn’t compete at all.

But she did teach Winston Churchill how to paint; and in a roundabout way, that saved his life. Winston was subject to terrible, dark depressions which he called his “Black Dog”. The only thing that got him through was learning how to paint. Hazel was his tutor.

Lady Soames, Churchill’s last surviving child, told me how much her parents liked the Laverys. Hazel spent a lot of time at the Churchills’ Hyde Park home, in the 1920s.

Michael Collins had been a kind of protégé, since he had first met her as a young man. When he returned to London in 1921, she renewed her friendship with him; and then she fell intensely in love with him.

So did half the women in London. It is impossible to exaggerate the impact that Mick Collins had when he arrived in London in October 1921. The popular press went mad for him. He was treated like a rock star. He couldn’t go anywhere without girls mobbing him.

He was fond of Hazel Lavery, and she helped him immensely by promoting the Irish cause throughout London society. But by 1921 she was forty, and rather in the category of the older woman. Mary Soames remembers that she began to dye her hair, and as hairdye was then rather primitive, sometimes Hazel looked rather alarming, at least to a child’s eye.

When Collins was killed, Hazel nearly went demented with grief. She donned widows’ weeds and had to be restrained from throwing herself into the grave. She did, however, sufficiently recover herself to have an affair, a little later, with Kevin O’Higgins.

She had a thing for Free Staters, it seemed.

Still, the amitié amoureuse between Lady Lavery and Michael Collins remains a tender and bewitching story, and well worth a movie in itself.

Irish Independent Magazine: 29 July 2006.

Mary’s play about Michael Collins and Winston Churchill, ‘Allegiance’ – and Lady Lavery’s part in their meeting – is opening at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh on August 7. See website: www.assemblyrooms.com