The 1805 Dispatches #22.04 August 2022 9 of 9 up on Long Island prior to moving to Zurich. There she met Peter’s brother, John, and in the course of time they married and moved to London where Peter got to know her well. Peter writes : “I would stay with her and John while frequenting the postcard fairs” (Peter is a collector of ocean liner postcards designed by artists and an authority on the subject). “I remember” he continues, “laying out my ‘finds’ on the dining room table after each fair, often long into the night. Mother and John McCarthy, Senior, were very attached to Mary who showed much admiration for the Admiral Nelson collection in Portsmouth. I remember Mary as a very welcoming and gracious hostess, the dining table and menus always perfection. It was a special delight staying in a house, and chalet, decorated by Mary.” The last time I myself met Mary was in 2006 at the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Lily McCarthy (1914-2006) in St. Ann’s Church in Portsmouth Dockyard, followed by a reception in Lily’s gallery at the Royal Naval Museum. A memorable event in itself. Mary was born on July 21, 1937, and died May 11, 2022. Her Requiem Mass was held at La Paroise Catholique de Collonge-Bellerive, in Switzerland. It is perhaps fitting to close with a poem that was dear to Mary and was quoted on that sad occasion: From Kenneth Flemming: Mary Aylwin McCarthy was the wife of John G McCarthy Jr. John is the son of our first President Lily Lambert McCarthy CBE who died March 3, 2006. Mary passed away on May 11 after a two-year illness. Married for 46 years John and Mary lived in a quiet village near Lake Geneva and the Jura Mountains, Switzerland, but often came over for what they called the Club’s splendid events. Some members will recall one such splendid event was the Club’s first dinner during a very hot June evening onboard HMS Victory with President Lily McCarthy and husband John McCarthy together with the Club’s senior Vice President Jean and Jay Kislack. Jean was also an avid and acclaimed Nelsonian collector of Emma Hamilton including Romney portraits. Guests were treated to a fine sunset seen fromVictory’s quarter deck as guests of her then commanding officer Mike Cheshire. Mary inherited, and in John’s own words “fell right in with my mother’s interest in Admiral Nelson”, joining Club members at Trafalgar Night dinners they attended the Club’s last dinner together at HMS Nelson. John says it his intention to continue in that tradition. Though I am dead, grieve not for me with tears. Think not of death with sorrowing and fears. I am so near that every tear you shed Touches and torments me, tho’ you think me dead. But when you laugh and sing in glad delight My soul is lifted upward to the light: Laugh and be glad for all that life is giving And I, tho’ dead will share your joy in LIVING. Anon. Lily Lambert McCarthy For the information of more recent members of the Club, or other readers, Lily Lambert McCarthy was an American millionairess decorated by the British for her war work, and also a generous benefactress of museums and libraries in England and the United States. As a young girl, Lily became fascinated by Nelson after being given a leather-bound first edition of Southey’s biography by her father. She became an avid Nelson collector, and her growing collection required its own room wherever she lived. Lily campaigned against the demolition of some handsome 18thcentury warehouses in Portsmouth which eventually became the Royal Navy Museum. In May 1972, Lily presented her Nelson collection to the Royal Navy. When the Navy announced that the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal would fetch the collection from New York, she objected, saying that Nelson would have not have known what a carrier was. The frigate HMS Lowestoft, namesake of the ship in which Nelson had been a lieutenant, was diverted from Hong Kong to the United States to transport it. Today these and other artefacts from the museum’s own Nelson collection can be seen in the Lily Lambert McCarthy Nelson Gallery at the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth, whose windows gaze on to Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory. In recognition of Lily’s generosity, Queen Elizabeth II appointed her an honorary commander of the Order of the British Empire. Lily also gave her 1,000-volume collection to Portsmouth Central Library and another Nelson collection to the Mariners’ Museum at Newport News, Virginia. She became a Vice President of the Society for Nautical Research in Greenwich and President of The 1805. On the outbreak of war in 1939, young Lily founded and ran the Princeton branch of the British War Relief Society and was appointed an honorary OBE in 1947 for her wartime welfare work for the Royal Navy. In 1944, she married John G McCarthy. In 1995, she published Remembering Nelson (1995), a scholarly catalogue of her collect-ion at the Royal Naval Museum. Admired for her grace and ability to inspire others, Lily was said to have “a hint of Katharine Hepburn at her most languidly imperious”. Lily died in 2006, her husband John having died in 2000, she is survived by three children from her first marriage, David Fleming of Worcester, Massachusetts, Lily Norton of Camden, South Carolina, and Peter Fleming of Long Beach, California; and two children from her second marriage, John G McCarthy Jr. (Mary’s husband) of Geneva, and Ann Zavala of San José, Costa Rica.
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