Garech Domnagh Browne (25 June 1939 – 10 March 2018) was an Irish art collector and a notable patron of Irish arts, in particular traditional Irish music. He was the founder of Claddagh Records and was instrumental in the formation of The Chieftains. He was often known by a Gaelic translation of his English name, Garech de Brún, or alternatively Garech a Brún, especially in Ireland.
Family and early life Browne was born on 25 June 1939 at Glenmaroon House, on the edge of the Phoenix Park in Chapelizod, Dublin, the eldest of the three sons of Dominick Geoffrey Browne, 4th Baron Oranmore and Browne (1901–2002) and his second wife, Oonagh Browne (née Guinness), daughter of The Hon. Ernest Guinness, the second son of the 1st Earl of Iveagh. Oonagh was a wealthy heiress to the Guinness fortune and the youngest of the three "Golden Guinness Girls", along with her sisters Maureen and Aileen. Garech's father had the rare distinction of sitting in the House of Lords for 72 years, until his death at the age of 100 in August 2002, without ever speaking in a debate. At Browne's christening, held in St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, his seven sets of godparents included his aunts, his grandparents, and the inventor Guglielmo Marconi.
As both his parents were married three times, Garech had two stepmothers and two stepfathers, as well as a number of half-siblings, including two adopted siblings, Desmond and Manuela, from his mother's marriage to Miguel Ferreras, who was later found to have been a former Spanish fascist named José Marias Ozores Laredo. His only full brother, The Hon. Tara Browne, was a young London socialite whose death at the age of 21 in a car crash in London's West End helped inspire John Lennon when writing the song "A Day in the Life" with Paul McCartney.
Browne's early life was divided between his father's home at Castle MacGarrett, near Claremorris, County Mayo, and his mother's home at Luggala, set deep in the Wicklow Mountains in County Wicklow, which her father Ernest Guinness had bought for her as a wedding present around 1936, from Mervyn Richard Wingfield, 8th Viscount Powerscourt. Once fears that Luggala might be bombed during the Second World War had subsided, Browne spent long periods there as a child, recalling visits to the estate by diplomats and politicians, including Erskine Childers and the British representative to Éire, John Maffey. It was at Castle MacGarrett that Browne first developed his love of Irish traditional music, listening to a worker on the estate whistling tunes he found "magical", and following him around "like my own Pied Piper". He later recalled dancing to Irish music at around the age of three as one of his earliest and most vivid memories.
The family suffered a number of tragedies during Browne's childhood. In December 1943 his mother gave birth to a third son, who died two days later and was buried by the lake at Luggala with the grave marker "Baby Browne". Three years later, Tessa Kindersley, Oonagh's daughter from her first marriage, died within fifteen minutes of receiving a diphtheria vaccine and was also buried at Luggala. In January 1954, Luggala nearly burned to the ground in a fire caused by outdated electrical wiring, and restoration work began within weeks.
When Browne was eleven, his parents separated (their divorce was finalised in 1950). His father called him into his study and asked him to choose which parent he wished to live with; Browne chose his mother, reasoning that she would be more upset to lose him. Browne subsequently spent more time at Luggala, where his mother hosted lavish parties, more akin to salons, that brought together many Irish and British writers, artists and poets, including Seán O'Casey, Claud Cockburn, Lord Dunsany and Robert Kee, with whom Oonagh had a relationship for several years. The writer Brendan Behan, a frequent visitor, once remarked that one could say whatever one liked at Luggala, "so long as you don't take too long about it and it's said wittily".
Education Browne attended Castle Park school, in Dalkey, from the age of ten. He was set to sit the common entrance examination for Eton aged thirteen but failed it, and by the time he passed, his place had been lost; he was sent instead to Institut Le Rosey, an international boarding school near Lausanne, Switzerland, whose pupils at the time included the Aga Khan and Thady Wyndham-Quin, 7th Earl of Dunraven. Browne brought his time at the school to an abrupt end by sending himself a telegram purporting to be from his mother, reading: "Unforeseen circumstances. Come home immediately. Your loving mother".
He was next sent to Bryanston School in Dorset, on the recommendation of the artist Lucian Freud, who was married to Browne's cousin, Lady Caroline Blackwood. His time there was equally brief, and his formal education ended at the age of fifteen, giving rise to a joke that his only official qualifications were licences to drive a horse-cab and a car. He later described schools as "rehearsals for prison" and said the only things he had wanted to learn, "music, literature, real history", were not taught.
Browne considered himself largely self-taught, crediting his mother's guests at Luggala with his real education. The writer Derek Lindsay (A. E. Ellis) taught him about classical music and opera, Freud introduced him to Behan, Anthony Cronin and Patrick Swift, and Francis Bacon gave him a tour of the Louvre. Other guests at Luggala during his youth included the film director John Huston, the writer Liam O'Flaherty, and the British poets Robert Graves and Iris Tree.
Discovery of Irish traditional music Having abandoned formal schooling, the teenage Browne spent time in Paris, living in his mother's apartment, taking a course in French civilisation at the Sorbonne and studying French at the Berlitz school. One of his Berlitz teachers, who came from Brittany, asked him questions about Ireland that Browne found he was unable to answer; he later said it was this experience that led him to decide he ought to know more about his own country.
Around this time Browne visited Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands and the birthplace of the family friend Liam O'Flaherty. On the boat crossing he heard a woman humming and, struck by the tunes, approached her; she turned out to be the singer Máire Áine Ní Dhonnchadha, who had not realised she was singing aloud.
Browne had also begun listening to Irish traditional music broadcasts on Radio Éireann, in particular A Job of Journeywork, presented from 1955 by the folklorist Ciarán Mac Mathúna. Through family connections he met Mac Mathúna and travelled the country with him as he recorded traditional musicians singing and playing in private houses and local pubs.
In 1956, Browne bought a mews house on Quinn's Lane, off Pembroke Street, Dublin, and began frequenting the few venues in the city where live Irish music could be heard, such as The Brazen Head and the Pipers' Club on Thomas Street. He also attended fleadhanna cheoil around the country, and at one in County Clare that year he met the piper Paddy Moloney; the pair spent so much time together that they were nicknamed "Ballcock and Browne", a pun on Moloney's job with a firm of builders' suppliers and a nod to aviators Alcock and Brown. Browne also took uilleann pipe lessons, alongside his friend Ivor Browne (no relation), with the piper Leo Rowsome.
In 1958, Browne and his brother Tara spent six weeks touring Ireland with a two-reel Grundig tape recorder, recording traditional musicians, singers and storytellers. On one of these trips, to Miltown Malbay, Browne met the uilleann piper Willie Clancy. Frustrated that no record company was willing to release a long-playing record of Rowsome's music, Browne and Ivor Browne, together with the poet John Montague and others, raised around £500, roughly the average annual wage of a teacher at the time, to fund an album. The future president Erskine Childers is reported to have upbraided Browne around this time for recording "squealing pipes and old women wailing songs by the hearthside", at a time when Childers felt Ireland should be presenting a modern image to the world.
Claddagh Records and The Chieftains Out of these efforts grew Claddagh Records, founded by Browne with Ivor Browne, John Montague and the genealogist Liam Mac Alasdair, among others, and named after the district close to Galway city. As Browne was not yet twenty-one, he was legally a minor and unable to become a director of the company; he had to wait until his twenty-first birthday, in 1960, for Claddagh Records to be formally incorporated. In the autumn of 1959, Claddagh released its first LP, Rowsome's Rí na bPíobairí ("The King of the Pipers"), which sold out despite industry doubts that there was a market for such recordings.
At around the same time, the composer Seán Ó Riada recruited Moloney to arrange music for a play at the Abbey Theatre, out of which grew Ó Riada's ensemble, Ceoltóirí Chualann. In 1962, Moloney, together with Sean Potts, Michael Tubridy, fiddle player Martin Fay and bodhrán player David Fallon, recorded what was intended as a one-off album for Claddagh. Initially named the Quare Fellas, after Behan's 1954 play, the group was renamed The Chieftains on Montague's suggestion, taking the name from a poetry collection he was writing at the time, Death of a Chieftain. Garech was instrumental in the formation of the group, and Claddagh went on to release the band's first six LPs, beginning with their self-titled debut in 1964.
Spoken word was also an important part of the Claddagh catalogue. The label recorded a number of Irish poets reading their own work, including Patrick Kavanagh (whose collection Almost Everything was recorded in the early 1960s), Austin Clarke, Thomas Kinsella, Montague and a young Seamus Heaney, as well as English poets Ted Hughes and Robert Graves. In 1966, Samuel Beckett oversaw the recording, in London, of the actor Jack MacGowran reading extracts from his theatre work, and, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, Claddagh released Rebel Irishwomen, featuring the voices of Helena Molony, Kathleen Behan and Maud Gonne MacBride. In 1971, shortly before Ó Riada's death, Browne persuaded him to come to Luggala to record Irish dance music and song airs on an upright harpsichord made in Dublin in 1764; the resulting album, Ó Riada's Farewell, was released posthumously.
Browne paid close attention to album artwork and sleeve notes, which he regarded as "unifying" the arts, commissioning covers from artists such as Louis le Brocquy, Patrick Scott, Edward Delaney and Barrie Cooke, and sleeve notes from writers including Benedict Kiely and Montague. While Claddagh Records had declined in importance by the late twentieth century, at the time of his death Browne was planning the re-release of several albums and had begun compiling a history of the label.
Patron of the Arts In 1964, Browne bought Woodtown Manor, a Georgian house near Rathfarnham, which he maintained alongside his rooms in Dublin. For several years it was, like Luggala, a welcoming place for Irish poets, writers and musicians, and the folk-pop group Clannad made many recordings there. Browne sold Woodtown Manor in 1997 to the property developer Seán Dunne for £1.4 million, and later sold much of its contents at auction for a further £2.3 million; among the items sold were an antique commode and a pair of fossilised deer antlers, which fetched £20,000.