Beschreibung:

Michael Collins and Moya Llewelyn Davies An important series of fourteen original letters from Moya Llewelyn Davies to the historian P.S. O'Hegarty, 1941-43, with personal recollections of Michael Collins and others, including disparaging comments on Lady Lavery and Kitty Kiernan, and with notes on the English Treaty negotiators prepared for Collins by her husband Crompton Llewelyn Davies. Thirteen ALS, one TLS, various sizes, with a few enclosures and associated envelopes. Crompton Llewelyn Davies, a Welsh civil servant from a Christian Socialist background, had been a friend of Lloyd George in his early days. His wife Moya was a daughter of James O'Connor, a former Fenian prisoner and MP for West Wicklow. She was intelligent and attractive, described as 'tall, thin, agile, extremely elegant'. The couple met Collins in late 1918, when he came to London with a Sinn Fein delegation, hoping to lobby the American President Woodrow Wilson on his way to the Peace Conference. A friendship developed, and Davies advised Collins during the Treaty talks in 1921. There have been reports of a personal relationship between Moya and Michael Collins and she undoubtedly knew him very well. She may have known P.S. O'Hegarty from the early 1920s, when he was active in the IRB and Sinn Fein. In 1941 he was Secretary of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, and working on his history of Ireland under the Union. She wrote to him to seek a telephone at her new home in Co. Wicklow, and a correspondence began in which she gives much first-hand information about Michael Collins and others. Her letters are sharply written, full of frank and perceptive comments. A long letter dated 25 May 1943 is entirely about Collins. From 1918 until his death, she says, they saw him very often. While he was working on the new Irish Constitution in 1922, he used to meet Crompton in London, while Moya saw him in Dublin during the Treaty debates, and later in her Raheny home several times a week. She says the books written about Collins give an incomplete picture of him. In the last year of his life he was shedding his wild, drinking, larking side; he used to come to her home because of its peacefulness. It was an old house, spacious and beautiful. She says he loved beautiful things, had a hunger for them, knew he had not had them and that it was a loss to him. Moya says that Collins' fianc�e Kitty Kiernan belonged to his rowdy past, and was a heavy drinker, plain and vulgar. She claims that Collins asked her once to take Kitty under her wing and show her how to be a lady. 'And when he told me that she was brainless, I said, ''Then why on earth are you marrying her?'' He laughed, answering ''Because she is a devil!'' ' Moya's explanation was that Collins was intensely shy, had no experience of women, and found the Kiernan girls easy company. 'I believe he had never had any sexual experience. I got the impression that he was still virginal.' On 8 June 1943, Moya doubts whether Lady Lavery had 'that relationship' with Collins; she was already a grandmother in 1922, or nearly so, and only looked well at a distance. Of Erskine Childers, she says her husband strongly advised him not to come to Ireland, since he would be more use to the Irish cause in England where he had some literary reputation; but it was no use as his wife was determined to come to Ireland and be a Madame Roland. She claims (20.9.41) that Cathal Brugha, Austin Stack and Bob Brennan were all enemies of Collins, the last two long before the Truce. With the June letter she sent typescript notes on the English Treaty delegates, written by Crompton for Michael Collins The note on Lloyd George describes him as slippery, but with a winning charm and a way of seeing the essentials of a situation in a flash. It advises Collins to appeal to him as a brother Celt, and to show him that he cannot support the independence of small nations while resorting to force in Ireland. Collins should impress upon him that he