US general took time out to appreciate wine and gardening in Ardmore

HE famously led the Allies during WW2 and bailed out a crippled Europe in its aftermath but it’s lesser known that FDR-confidant General George C. Marshall visited Ardmore in the early 1940s and that a surviving rhododendron on the 16th century Ashbrook estate was named after one of the greatest figures of the last century.

General Marshall, Chief of Staff of the US Army during WW2, was one of a number of illustrious American visitors to Ashbrook during the conflict.

Alongside the neighbouring Beech Hill estate Ashbrook - between 1942 and 1944 - became a curious hybrid of Anglo-Irish big house and US army boot camp due to the billet of hundreds of US Marines in the area.

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Accompanying General Marshall were the US diplomats Harry Lloyd Hopkins and William Averell Harriman both of whom were close to Roosevelt and Churchill and both of whom were assigned on missions to Moscow to deal with Joseph Stalin.

Mr Harriman actually served as official US Ambassador to the Soviet Union during the formative years of the later 20th century whilst Hopkins acted as an emissary to the USSR for both Roosevelt and later Truman.

Marshall of course bailed out post-war Europe with the recovery fund to which he gave his name in order to create a bulwark against the spread of Soviet communism and also went on to be named TIME magazine man of the year and to win a Nobel Peace prize.

Interestingly, the trio - who all attended the landmark Yalta conference of 1945 - together enjoyed a brief sojourn at Ashbrook as guests of the Beresford-Ash family during the war.

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The visit has become part of Ashbrook lore. Agnès Beresford-Ash told the Sentinel how her late husband John - a young boy at the time and dubbed the ‘tow-haired’ gentleman by Marshall in reference to his flaxen locks - often spoke with warmth about his family’s famous war-time guests before his sad passing last year.

Mrs Beresford-Ash said that despite the pressure of effectively running the Second World War, General Marshall found time to say goodbye to her mother-in-law Lady Betty Helena and to thank her for her hospitality when it was time to leave.

“At that stage she was giving a bath to my husband who was three or four,” she explained. “He went to the bathroom and said, ‘Lady Helena, I just want to thank you and tell me what is your little lady called?’

“My husband had long blonde hair and my mother-in-law turned around and said ‘no, no general this is not a little lady it’s a little gentleman.’

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“He promised he would send a box of candy, which he later sent with a letter which said ‘I enclose a box of candy for the little tow-haired gentleman again because of his flax-like blonde hair.”

Unfortunately, the candy-box has disappeared along with the sweets which were duly devoured by the grateful John Beresford Ash when they finally arrived but another living memento of the time remains in the shape of a red arboretum rhododendron in the Ashbrook grounds.

General Marshall stopped to admire the plant before leaving the estate despite the disapproval of his driver.

Mrs Beresford Ash elaborates: “Later on they must have passed my husband to his nanny or something. They went outside and General Marshall said ‘Lady Helena, that rhododendron on the lawn what do you call it?’

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“She obviously being a very good and knowledgable gardener told him what it was. He said: ‘It’s fantastic. I must go and have a look. It’s such a lovely colour.’ His driver at that stage said to him: ‘Excuse me general. We must rush!’ We must rush!

“And he turned around and said: ‘I’m very sorry but the war can wait for a rhododendron.’

“And he walked along the whole length of the front lawn and went to look at the rhododendron which from then on was called General Marshall’s rhododendron.”

Despite his interest in the Beresford-Ash family’s garden and his promise of confectionary for the little ‘tow-haired gentleman’ made good, the visit was not without the odd faux-pas on the part of the Americans.

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They didn’t, it appears, seem sensitive to the shortages felt in war-time Europe where most basic essentials were under restriction. Travelling on to England after their visit they apparently bad-mouthed the Beresford-Ash family to their peers.

“You will realise that at that stage there were quite a lot of restrictions and a very limited amount of food,” said Mrs Beresford-Ash.

“Apparently, when they left the house they went back to England and told everybody that Major Beresford and his wife were very mean with the food.

“They didn’t have a slice of bacon or sausage for breakfast. You couldn’t get it for money or anything. But America being the land of plenty at the time, they did not understand that,” she said.

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This ingratitude was particularly bad form considering the esteemed visitors were treated to a 1929 Bordeaux; a good year by all accounts.

“My father-in-law had gone to get one of his very best bottles of claret. I’ve still got the bottle in the house inscribed by my father-in-law in his own hand: ‘This bottle was drunk by General Marshall and Averell Harriman.’

“It was Chateau Pichot-Longueville 1929 which I’m told was an excellent vintage,” she told the paper.

Much later a Harvard academic wrote to the family about the famous wine: “He was saying he heard this story about this bottle of wine. Apparently you’re father-in-law went and got some wine from his barrel and took it to the decanter.

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“I replied, ‘No. My father in law did not have a barrel. We didn’t have barrels in this country. Maybe of beer but not wine.’

“He went to his cellar and got a bottle which he decanted because good wine has to be decanted. Yet again maybe the Americans in those days weren’t champions of good wine.”

Notwithstanding these awkward moments the Americans were otherwise remembered fondly in Ashbrook for many years afterwards.

“I think they were quite nice but it must have been embarrassing for my parents-in-law who would have liked to entertain them properly and they hardly had any food.

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“They had things like cream and milk because they made it on the farm but they didn’t have lots of meat and lots of bacon rashers and sausages.

“I think it was slightly ungrateful to think that they were being mean. It was just the war. Part of the garden and everything was turned into crops of vegetables because you couldn’t find anything, you know, it was the depth of the war really with all the restrictions.”

Ashbrook - as it happened - could not have been a more appropriate stopping off point for a US Chief of Staff given the estate’s martial history.

Mrs Beresford-Ash’s husband’s ancestor, General Thomas Ash, was originally granted the estate by Queen Elizabeth 1 as reward for fighting the O’Neill and the O’Donnell during the Nine Years War.

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This was before the Plantation of Ulster and the early establishment of the Beresford-Ash family on the outskirts of Londonderry makes the family one of the oldest Protestant familys in Ulster.

Back in the early 1940s with the establishment of ‘Base One Europe’ in the city and the encampment of hundreds of US Marines at Ashbrook and Beech Hill the sound of war was in the air once more in Ardmore.

“At the other side of the road from our house along Currynierin you can see there’s a wooded area at the top and that was what the Americans called the camp. That’s where they had all their Nissan huts and all their entertainments for the troops and the tennis courts.

“They used to train there and had a firing range and all sorts of things. There was a lot of noise coming out apparently. John used to say you could hear the noise when on their loudspeakers they would call somebody and so on,” she explained.

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Amazingly, it was the estate’s early military-duty fortifications that also served the family as a make-shift air raid shelter during the Luftwaffe bombing raid which resulted in the Messines Park atrocity.

A huge wall between the kitchen and scullery formed part of General Thomas Ash’s original pioneering outpost in Gaelic Ulster in the 1590s and continued to protect the family right up until the 1940s albeit in a way that could never have been imagined.

“A bomb fell on Derry. There were sirens and everything else. The original wall of the house in the kitchen and scullery (approximately 2 to 3 metres across) - when you see it you’d think it was a passage but it’s actually a solid wall - they used to stand there, the three of them until the air raid siren blew and they knew they were safe again because they thought the house would not collapse on top of them as the wall was such a strong support,” she said.

Eventually, the US Marines abandoned Ardmore. Surreally, the cutlery and crockery were left on the tables of the mess when they left.

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“The tables were still laid. It was an extraordinary thing. One day they were there and then suddenly they weren’t,” was how the story was told at Ashbrook.

“It took quite a bit of time to get things back to so-called normal. They had to dig out all the Nissan Huts and tennis courts and everything. The camp’s returned into a sort of woodland now along the little lane beside Currynierin,” she said.

“They were treasured memories on my husband’s part. To get a box of candy from General Marshall. Not everybody got one and the letter as well. I think he was a very nice man actually,” she added.

“The other two maybe took second place to him. He was the Chief of Staff, very important, and I think he got on quite well with Churchill which was quite useful. He went on to come up with the Marshall Plan which was quite something. He had a brain definitely,” she added.

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