THE funeral will take place tomorrow, Wednesday, of a nephew of Lord Leitrim, ‘The Honourable’ Henry Vickers Strutt.
He died at Letterkenny General Hospital on Monday. He was 97.
His remains are reposing at the Holy Trinity Church, Carrigart today with a funeral service tomorrow, Wednesday, morning at 11am with burial afterwards in the adjoining cemetery.
The Hon. Hedley Strutt had lived at Mulroy House, Carrigart.
He often spoke of his family history, the Elizabethan and Cromwellian periods, and his ancestor Clements who fought with Cromwell in Ireland.
He served in the British military as an officer in the Scots Guards. His grandfather, a great inventor, designed a component used in electric light bulbs.
Hedley Strutt’s mother, Hilda Clements, was born and reared at Manor Vaughan House, the ancestral home of the Earls of Leitrim, and he often discussed his early family life and the fact that he and his siblings were all looked after by a nanny after his mother died when he was aged four.
Hedley Strutt’s grandparents ran the Rosapenna Hotel.
During world war two his platoon of Scots Guards were wiped out in a friendly fire incident.
Politically he was a friend of the Unionist Prime Minister of the North Captain Terence O’Neill.
He was friends to many people locally.
His ancestor, the 3rd Earl of Leitrim, was shot dead in April 1878 on his way to his home at Mulroy.
He had been despised by tenants – Catholic and Presbyterian – after a number of evictions. No-one was ever charged with his murder.
The 4th Earl, Robert Clements, was seen as a more caring landlord who brought in reforms on the 52,000 acre estate.
In a complete reversal of the 3rd Earl’s approach, the new landlord allowed evicted tenants to return to their farms and re-housed others.
He also promised to provide a house in Milford to shelter the poor and destitute so that they could avoid entering the workhouse. And it appears these initial gestures were no hyperbolae. In the following fourteen years, he initiated ventures to improve local business and built hotels and golf links to draw tourists. He also inaugurated a line of steamers to run between Mulroy Bay and Glasgow, via Derry, thus providing access to markets for the estate produce.
On his death in 1892, he was buried near Mulroy `amid signs of mourning from the tenantry among whom he had lived and for whose benefit he had worked’.
