Behind the military armour of Randal Plunkett, 19th Lord Dunsany ,who died earlier this month, aged 92, after a long illness cheerfully borne lurked the most charming and amusing of men, witty, urbane, scholarly and civilised to a degree rarely found in a professional soldier. His knowledge of history and in particular of Irish matters was profound.
He cut a fine figure in his black pinstripe suit with floppy white shirt collar and a faint aroma of snuff. His second wife, Sheila, who survives him, was a tower of strength in the cultural world of Dublin. Sadly struck down in a car crash, she is now practically bed-ridden.
Anyone meeting them for the first time would have been forgiven for assuming that she was the one who loved art and that he was the wooden soldier, but they would have been wrong. Randal had an extraordinary eye for beautiful objects. He never paid huge sums for the things that he acquired, but his Landseer and his John, and above all his collection of bronzes, are a testimony to that eye. If Sheila overshadowed his collecting by hers, his should be remembered as a surprising adjunct to his persona.
The ring of his ancestor Saint Oliver Plunkett, which came down to Lord Dunsany, is said to have the power to heal the sick and if a neighbour was in great distress he would somehow find the time to take it to the bedside.
Educated at Eton, he joined the 16th/5th Lancers in 1926, transferring to the Indian Army in the late 1920s and serving in the Guides Cavalry and Indian Armoured Corps. He served on the North West Frontier during the second World War, commanding a squadron above the Khojak Pass in the summer of 1941. Subsequently he saw active service in Central Asia, particularly on reconaissance seeking ways to prevent the Germans moving southwards. Later he served in the Western Desert and saw action at El Alamein. He retired in 1947 with the rank of Lt. Colonel.
While in the army he also had a career as a dashing polo player. A former Master of the Tara Harriers, he farmed extensively at the family estate of the 12th century Dunsany Castle in Co Meath. He shot well. Randal and Sheila stayed every year at Glenveagh Castle, Co Donegal, with that wonderful host and raconteur Henry McIlhenny, President of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Randal would go stalking the deer at Glenveagh and never missed his target. He astonished not only himself when he pulled a reluctant 17lb salmon out of Lough Veagh , where no salmon had ever been seen before.
Edward, Randal's only son, is an artist. His portrait of Charles Haughey recently earned an award. His late mother Vera was one of the belles of pre-war London with her beautiful sister Aimee: like Edward's present wife Mary-Alice, they came from Brazil.
Randal and Sheila's daughter Beatrice read a poem by James Elroy Flecker as her father was lowered into his grave, on a mound near Dunsany Castle, a place he had chosen in his youth. Sheila could not witness the burial because her wheel chair could not go up the steep mound in the snow.
They will for long be remembered as a wonderful couple, elegant, cultivated and fun. He used to tell an anecdote about a friend who killed himself: when the suicide note was torn open it read simply: " All that buttoning and unbuttoning."
D.G.