from Ballymahon to Brideshead

Eduardo Casey (see Footprint 8.10.26) was a wealthy landowner in 1800s Argentina, one of a number of Irish estancia owners to become major players in the country’s thoroughbred-racing world. Others involved included the Duggans, Maguires and Gaynors.

These Irishmen are remembered by place names in the country. On a ramble through Argentina, I ended up in the town of San Antonio de Areco, over one hundred kilometres northwest of Buenos Aires. The capital of a partido (district) of the same name, it is one of many that in the 1800s was home to the Irish.

To the east of San Antonio de Areco is Diego Gaynor. James Gaynor from Westmeath arrived in Argentina in the 1830s/40s; when he died in 1892, he owned around 200,000 acres of land, more or less the size of County Louth.

West of town are the railway stations of Kenny, Doyle and Maguire. The last of these is named for Eduardo Pedro Maguire who, in 1907, donated the land on which the station is built. In the 1920s, Maguire was one of the 30 largest landholders in Argentina.

Also to the west, twenty kilometres from San Antonio de Areco, is the town of Duggan.
In 1888, the three Duggan brothers, Michael, John and Thomas of Ballymahon, County Longford, owned approximately 750,000 acres of land.

An ardent Irish nationalist, Thomas Duggan once invited Roger Casement to his estancia here. Duggan’s nationalism was such that he preferred not to do business with English-owned banks and cold-storage plants.

In 1906, Duggan’s son Alfredo was appointed honorary attaché at the Argentine embassy in London. Alfredo’s son, Leo Alfred, grandson of the uber-nationalist Thomas Duggan, was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford (where he ferried himself about in a Rolls-Royce). He later worked for London’s Natural History Museum and, in World War II, served with the London Irish Rifles.

Leo Duggan wrote a great many historical novels, as well as works of non-fiction. His brother, Hubert, a Conservative MP for Acton, had also attended Oxford, where he was friends with Evelyn Waugh (he would later be godfather to Waugh’s daughter, Margaret).

Hubert Duggan lapsed from the Catholic faith during his youth, but with Waugh’s intervention received absolution on his deathbed, a scene later transplanted by Waugh to his novel Brideshead Revisited.