Garry Trench, from Melbourne, now of Belmont, Lower Hutt, New Zealand

My Trench line traces back to the first Earl of Clancarty William Power Keating Trench, my five greats grandfather. His son Charles is said to have fathered several ex-nuptial children, one of whom Robert Le Poer Trench QC is my three greats grandfather. Robert started his legal studies in London in 1839, the year of his father’s death, and was called to the bar in 1842. He travelled the world and settled in Melbourne in the 1850s. He had a successful career in law, specialising in mining law, then became Victoria’s Attorney General, and in 1880 was appointed a County Court judge.

I became interested in my family history when my Father was researching the Australian branch of the Trench family. It has been a fascinating if time-consuming hobby. My interest and research led me to Rod Smith’s first book "Guinness Down Under". I have subsequently got to know Rod and Glennis. Rod is an engaging conversationalist, and his writing style is equally appealing. I am not traditionally a reader, but that book was hard to put down.

Several years ago, Rod told me he was considering writing the Trench history. How lucky could we be – an interesting and gifted historian writing about our family? Maybe this would be the time when I would learn more about my ancestor the Archdeacon, and about the family’s time at Garbally House. "Clancarty" does not disappoint. My questions have been thoroughly answered, and Rod has written with the same flair and style as his previous work. Thoroughly researched, this is a colourful account of the Earldom and members of the Trench family.

Revd Professor Patrick Comerford, formerly Trinity College Dublin and the Church of Ireland Theological Institute

How we understand the place of landed, titled families in Ireland and their contribution to Irish life has changed profoundly in recent years. This reappraisal has been helped, in part, by the Landed Estates project at the University of Galway, the fresh approach and publications programme at the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates at Maynooth University, pioneered by Professor Terence Dooley, and the work of historians in response to the ‘Decade of Centenaries’, including the Easter Rising in 1916, the War of Independence and the Irish Civil War.

In the past, writers were often dismissive of the roles of families such as these, caricaturing them as oppressive or capricious landlords, portraying them as quaint or eccentric, or finding them relative to nation-building narratives only when their scions were creative writers such as WB Yeats or George Bernard Shaw, or identified with nationalist causes, as with Henry Grattan, William Smith O’Brien or Douglas Hyde.

Too often, the Irish identity of these families was easily questioned or traduced, with pejorative labels such as ‘planters’ or hyphenated stereotyping such as ‘Anglo-Irish’ that doubted their identity and that implied Irish identity depends on particular cultural, linguistic or supposed ethnic backgrounds. The unsettling rise of populist racism in Ireland is a consequence of cultivating a definition of Irish identity that is neither broad enough nor tolerant enough, that is not visionary enough to embrace the variety and breadth of ethnicity and culture that contributes to the mosaic making up the full, beautiful, diverse and rich picture of Irish identity.

The contribution of the Trench family to that mosaic is both rich and beautiful in its scope. They were French Huguenots in their origins, so offering an early contribution to linguistic and religious pluralism in Ireland. And their lives have embraced church life, and the cultural, political, architectural, educational and social life of Ireland.

In this book, Rod Smith retells the Clancarty story, a remarkable tale of a family whose members are more than eccentric title holders or benign landowners. Every family has its surfeit of embarrassing members, in this case the eighth earl, who openly sympathised with Hitler and the Nazis, and later believed in flying saucers and aliens living at the centre of the earth. On the other hand, the ninth earl is an artist and crossbench peer who is vocal about the arts and Europe and those on society’s margins.

A wider study of the Trench family would include Richard Chenevix Trench, Archbishop of Dublin and a key figure in initiating the Oxford English Dictionary; Wilbraham Fitzjohn Trench, Professor of English Literature at Trinity College Dublin and a trenchant critic of both Yeats and Joyce; Terry Trench, a founding figure in An Óige, the Irish Youth Hostel Association; and the academic and journalist Brian Trench and his brother the musician and composer Fiachra Trench.

One of the untold stories that continues to fascinate me is that of Archbishop Power Le Poer Trench of Tuam. Although a vigorous evangelical, he was sensitive to Irish culture and was loathe to ordain any man for his diocese who did not speak Irish. His portrait was inherited by his direct descendant, the psychiatrist Dr Maurice O’Connor Drury (1907-1976). Con Drury first met Ludwig Wittenstein in Cambridge in 1929 and their friendship lasted until Wittgenstein died in 1951. Drury was the psychiatrist who helped to restore Wittgenstein to full health in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s, and so a descendant of the Clancarty Trenches rescued one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century.

These untold stories offer a wider perspective on a family whose rich and varied biographies and contributions to Irish life are introduced in this insightful study. Thankfully, this book introduces the truth that the stories of families such as this must never be confined to the margins and the footnotes of Irish social and political history.

Darryl Lundy, Wellington, New Zealand

Publisher of thepeerage.com

I am so pleased that Rod has asked me to write a foreword for this fascinating book about the Trench family.

I first started creating a genealogical database of British peerage families about twenty years ago, which I then published online as thepeerage.com. This led to very interesting email correspondence with various Trench family members around the world with updates and anecdotes. And then some years ago I discovered that Glennis and Rod were friends of my wider family and we ended up having interesting chats about Guinness and Trench connections. A small world, and now the circle has been completed with this Foreword.

Several observations about the Trenches strike me reading this book. The first is how interconnected the Clancarty branch of the Trench family is by marriage with many other key landed families of Ireland over the last three hundred years. It is this level of interconnection within the upper levels of British society that first hooked me into capturing the relationships between the various peerage families in a database that developed into thepeerage.com.

The second is reading how unreliable and unproven the information is about the early origins of the Trench family. My work with thepeerage.com largely takes the information provided in Burkes Peerage and others as gospel. However, Rod makes it clear that there may be other explanations which don’t fit the family legends, legends which have been incorporated by the editors of these directories into family entries without much checking or genealogical proof being required (at least in the initial years of these publications).

So it has given me much pleasure to read such a well-researched and comprehensively documented history of this important Irish family. Directories give bare facts. This book has brought the people to life.