Miscellaneous

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Wyn was a big fan of shooting until it started to go out of fashion. He hunted kangaroo when he was a Jackeroo and shot a lot of game during the war on his farm to supplement the food rations.

Stories and memories

Wyn in 1939:

"I had previously taken on an upstairs flat in one of the delightful Devonshire Mews South cottages (number 101) which had a couple of bedrooms, an outside staircase and a four-car garage under it. It was very desirable, and I dare not think of the price it would fetch today. It had been rented out by Mother as manager while I was living elsewhere, and she was wont to complain bitterly that my tenant was always late with the rent. “Once when I went round to see about it the door was opened by a female who had painted toenails!” she gasped when regaling me with her story of horror. So affronted was she that she insisted the tenant quit the place immediately and I was sent round to dispatch the miscreant. And who should open the door but my old friend Clifford! We laughed heartily and rekindled our friendship on the spot. It was that very evening while we were out celebrating that he introduced me to the delicious Coyt Barry, a photographer’s model and catwalk mannequin living nearby in Lowndes Street, Knightsbridge. She was 17 years my junior and we got on swimmingly, so much so that as things became tougher and more dangerous in town, she moved out soon after I did and lived with me for most of the war."

John Carlisle (aka JC), one of Lady Eve’s paramours

John Carlisle, born in 1856 in Ballymena, was educated in RBAI. In 1871 he was apprenticed in Harland & Wolff, and from 1876 he spent two years studying engineering in QCB. He took up employment with a civil engineering firm in Chester, which had undertaken the construction of the Derry Central railway line in Co. Londonderry, and for four years was in charge of the project. He moved to a shipping agency in London, and before he was 30 set up (1883) his own shipping company with his brother Henry's assistance. In that year Harland & Wolff passed over to the Carlisle brothers the use of two steamers, and from this beginning Carlisle & Co gave rise to the Blue Star Line, and prospered exceptionally quickly to become one of the ‘largest private ship-owning firms in the metropolis’ (Leading men of London). In 1895 the combined length of all the Blue Star steamers was over a mile (1.6 km).

This line was distinct from another Blue Star Line, a merchant shipping company founded in 1911 by the Vestey family from Liverpool, specialising in refrigerated shipping, and very well known in the twentieth century. The Carlisle brothers built their firm into a highly lucrative enterprise, and its massive scale eventually attracted the attention of the Vestey brothers (the tycoons behind the global Blue Star Line shipping empire), who ultimately bought out the Carlisle brothers.

John Carlisle was a director of a number of marine assurance and other companies, and was said in 1895 to be a determined unionist. He married Emily Lucy in 1882, daughter of Charles Holland, a Liverpool merchant and most likely a relative of Charles Menzies Holland, the Chester civil engineer for whom Carlisle had worked in 1878–82, and whose wife Harriet (née Neill) had been born in Belfast. They lived in the very grand Ashburton House on the edge of Putney Heath.

Although Wyn mentions John and Lady Eve’s frequent and lengthy stays on the Med in the early 1920s after Fred had died, John had been married to Lucy since 1882. It was just an affair and he refused to divorce her so he and Eve could get married much to Wyn’s frustration (John was a VERY rich man). John, and indeed his wife, died in 1945, five years before Eve. On John’s part it was a rare sibling coincidence as he died of natural causes aged 89 in London on the exact same day - 20 January 1945 - as his younger brother and business partner, Henry Montgomery Carlisle. The brothers were cremated together.