Occupation Writer Nationality Irish/English | Name Mark Bence-Jones Role Writer | |
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Books Twilight of the Ascendancy, The Catholic Families | ||
MARK BENCE JONES GLENVILLE his memorial mass August 2010
Mark Adayre Bence-Jones (29 May 1930 – 12 April 2010) was a British writer, noted mainly for his books on Irish architecture, the British aristocracy and the British Raj. He regarded himself as being both Irish and English, seeing no contradiction in these statements of nationality.
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Life and works
Bence-Jones was the son of Colonel Philip Reginald Bence-Jones who was the head of an engineering school in Lahore, India. His mother was half French and half English and had been brought up in Alexandria, Egypt. Bence-Jones was born in London, in 1930, but most of his childhood was spent in India, and plans for his education in England were curtailed by the outbreak of World War II.
Following the war, the family moved to Ireland, where they had originally come from, the ancestral home having been Lisselane in County Cork, which had left family ownership in the early 1930s. Instead they bought a decaying country house called Glenville Park, located near Cork City. Bence-Jones completed his schooling at Ampleforth College, and went on to study history at Pembroke College, Cambridge, then agriculture at the Royal Agricultural College, at Cirencester, with the intention of running the family's estate in Ireland.
Bence-Jones is best known for his authorship of Burke's Guide to Country Houses Volume 1: Ireland, (1978). This was an ambitious work, trying to record the architecture of all the Irish country houses, including those that were, by then, lost or ruined. He made copious use of photographs and family albums in private ownership. He also wrote three books about India, Palaces of the Raj (1973), The Viceroys of India (1982) and Clive of India (1987). The first of these is believed to be the first book to give serious academic consideration to the subject of British architecture in India, He was the consultant editor for Burke's Irish Family Records, 1973–76.
He also tried his hand at writing novels: three comedies of upper-class life in Rome, London and Ireland. One of these received an enthusiastic review from John Betjeman, but none remain in print.
In 1965, he was married to Gillian Enid Pretyman, granddaughter of the Conservative politician Ernest George Pretyman and author of a collection of poems: Ostrich Creek, published in 1999. They had a son and two daughters.
Bence-Jones was a devout Catholic, serving, at one time, as Chancellor of the Irish Association of the Knights of Malta (see Sovereign Military Order of Malta), and attending the Lourdes pilgrimage.
In later years, ill health prevented him from finishing a biography of his friend, the novelist Elizabeth Bowen. It also limited his travelling, and he gave the house at Glenville to his younger daughter. Bence-Jones died in hospital in April 2010.