Hazel Lavery - Correspondence

Correspondence

Lady Lavery knew many famous figures of her era and corresponded with such notable figures as Maurice Baring, Hilaire Belloc, Owen Buckmaster, Tim Healy, Shane Leslie, Reginald McKenna, Jessie Louisa Rickard, George Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey, Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson and W. B. Yeats.

This correspondence became public long after her death and reveals much about her personality and how she was regarded by her contemporaries. Regarding a visit to Ireland by the British Royal family she noted shrewdly

...they have been trying to keep that yacht race matter very quiet – and for various reasons it is better not to emphasise the affair – people get the idea that the Royal family would not be safe in Ireland..."

In one of several letters she received from Winston Churchill he confided in her his thoughts about the creation of Northern Ireland

...I have practically always repeated what I said again & again in the House during the passage of the Bill, namely that we never contemplated the "mutilation" of Ulster. I think the Free State are making a frightful mistake in forcing this partition of their country. But of course, if they insist, the Treaty must be executed even though it be to the lasting injury of Irish unity...

Much of this correspondence alludes to Lady Lavery's charm and beauty. Leonie Leslie, the wife of Sir John Leslie, once wrote to her:

Dear little Hazel, I enjoyed Sunday's dinner – & I just want to tell you that I think you are not only a bewitching syren – but a Real Good Sort too!

Sir Gerald Kelly, president of the Royal Academy, wrote to Shane Leslie

I do know Hazel Lavery and thought she was a nuisance. A beautiful nuisance but a nuisance!

Provocatively, after her death Sir Shane Leslie discussed Lady Lavery's relationship with Michael Collins and Kevin O'Higgins and wrote

I have been talking about your proposed life of Hazel Lavery with my hostess. We agree that it is an excruciatingly difficult book to write especially as so much MS material has disappeared...We think that much is quite impossible to tell. Remember Miss Collins is alive and the widow of Kevin O'Higgins. If Hazel's correspondence with those Irishmen Collins and Kevin were published or even their relations were truly portrayed there would be woe in Dublin and much protestation. Both were hopelessly in love with Hazel in the style of Tristram with the wife of King Mark because they had drunk a poisonous drug not intended for them...The Republicans intercepted her letters to Collins & decided to shoot them both...

According to the memoirs of Derek Patmore, a writer, artist, and interior designer who was a close friend of Lady Lavery's, Collins was "the great love in her life" and that Sir Shane "told me that when Michael Collins was killed in an ambush they found a miniature of Hazel hanging around his neck with a poem Shane Leslie had written to her on the back of it." Speculation about the relationship between Collins and Lady Lavery led a newspaper of the day to refer to her as his "sweetheart", an issue Collins wrote to his fiance Kitty Kiernan about. According to the Sunday Independent

Even more than 80 years after his death, speculation is still rife over Michael Collins's love life and whether or not he had an affair with society queen Lady Hazel Lavery.

However, a 2006 book about Collins refutes this speculation:

...the IRA followed both Collins and Lady Lavery. They did a thorough examination of them, and they found nothing. If they had discovered they were having an affair, she would have been shot because they would have felt she was a double agent.