Desmond Guinness, Good to the Last Drop

Desmond Guinness (above), the charming champion of the Irish Georgian house, died August 20, during Ireland’s National Heritage Week. He was 88. Born on September 8, 1931, the younger son of the jeunesse dorée of the 1920s, Diana Mitford, the most beautiful of those sisters, and Bryan Guinness, son and heir of Hon Walter Guinness, recently Minister for Agriculture and soon to be created Baron Moyne.

Born in Buckingham Street, the Guinnesses’ London house, one of Desmond’s first visitors was Lytton Strachey. Well, one of his mother’s visitors – as Strachey famously disliked children. When the nurse came into the room with dark-long-haired Desmond, Strachey shrieked ‘Is it a wig?’ When he was one, he moved with his mother, brother Jonathan and six servants to Ebury Street (leaving at least a brace of them behind) so she could be closer to her lover, Oswald Mosley. Despite Diana’s wish for her sons (as she wrote to her sister, Unity, in 1936), ‘I would so love them…