Thomas Purefoy

Thomas Purefoy was my great uncle. I didn’t know Uncle Tom well. My mother didn’t like him but she excused his ill temper by saying that he had served in the 1st World War. Uncle Tom was a solicitor in the Royal Bank of Ireland. He was very wealthy and lived in a large house in Arkendale Road in Dalkey. He was a member of the Royal Irish Yacht Club in Dun Laoghaire, and sailed a boat called ‘Nepenthe’. He was married three times; to Hazel with whom he had a son, a ‘blue baby’ as they were called then, who died. Hazel took to the bed and the bottle. After her death in 1953, he married an Austrian woman called Clery (Clairie) and after her death he married a widow called Rhea.