Von Prondzynski ‘sad but relieved’ at Knockdrin sale

There’s always some sadness when the family home is sold – but Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski admits that in his case there is some relief too, now that new owners hold the keys of the castle which was his family’s home for 60 years.

“The castle is a wonderful building; an absolutely glorious building, but it swallows money like a bottomless pit,” he says of the stunning neo-Gothic Knockdrin Castle, located six miles outside of Mullingar.

Earlier this month, after three years on the market, and after an almost-deal with a Chinese consortium fell through, the 19,375 square foot castle and most of the 1350 acres of land that form the Knockdrin estate were sold for a sum of just under €10m to Meath couple Noel and Valerie Moran.

It’s not having to worry about the phenomenal running costs of a house in which the family no longer lives that forms the basis of Professor von Prondzynski’s relief: “For example last year, we weren’t living in it… but you still had to heat it - because you can’t leave it unheated. And just to heat the castle - and not heat it fully - last year cost €35,000. And then there’s ongoing maintenance and repairs; it’s really not viable.

“When my mother died I took a look at the figures and I just thought: ‘No: I can’t do this’.

“It was a sad moment, and it was an even sadder moment two weeks ago - actually three weeks ago now – when I eventually sort of handed over the keys, as it were.

“I thought: ‘Oh this is terrible you know; this has been my home for so long.’ But you have to be realistic.”

The Prondzynski family’s links with this area aren’t being severed completely – but if they do proceed with their dream of building a home on the 150 acres of land they chose to retain, it will be on a more modest scale than Knockdrin, which boasts not just 12 bedrooms and the usual kitchen, living and dining room combination, but among its several other rooms, a library and ballroom as well.

Professor von Prondzynski, former president of DCU; retired principal of Robert Gordon University in Scotland and now, in his retirement, an ordinand in the Scottish Episcopal Church, has only good memories of his childhood at Knockdrin; and delights in having heard of his family being referred to once to a friend of his as “the Westmeath Prondzynskis”.

It was in 1960 that the professor’s parents Hans-Joachim and Irene bought Knockdrin, moving in a year later, at which time Ferdinand was just seven. His elder sister, Isabelle, by then a senior-cycle student, attended Loreto, which she loved, as later did his second sister Aglaja; he meanwhile was dispatched to the prep school, Headfort, in Kells.

“I did actually quite enjoy Headfort. I was the first German they ever had so I was a bit of a curiosity. But I got on really well and I thrived there, so I look back on it affectionately. And I was home every holiday and Sundays and so on; it was not a bad time.

“Then we moved back to Germany in 1968 so I finished school in Germany, and I worked there for two years in a bank but then I came back to Ireland to study in Trinity College.

“Throughout all this we continued to own the estate.”

Their temporary return to Germany was prompted by Ferdinand’s father’s eventual boredom with the world of farming. Hans’s background was in industry, although his wife Irene’s family were farming people.

“My father’s family originally came from Poland,” says Professor von Prondzynski.

“My great great great great grandfather joined the Prussian Army and actually ended his career as a general; and so he then moved the family to Silesia, which of course is now part of Poland. And so that is where my father’s family came from.

“My mother’s family were landowners - farmers - for generations. They owned a farm in Lower Saxony.

“After the Second World War that farm was actually directly on the border with East Germany,

“The Elbe River, which marks the border at that point, was a very short distance away from the house and it became very difficult to manage. Initially there were refugees and then there was always a lot of security around the place.”

That, allied to a question mark over his father’s health meant that ultimately the family decided to sell.

Professor von Prondzynski’s father was in the German Army during the Second World War, but was badly injured. Following the war he went back to the cement-manufacturing business operated by his father, but for health reasons, his doctor advised him to take up a different lifestyle rather than industry, and maybe to go into agriculture.

“So they sold the place in Germany and bought Knockdrin as part of that decision to change their lifestyle.

“They didn’t have enough money to buy another farm in Germany but Irish land prices were much lower at that time and that’s what brought them to Ireland.”

They were far from being the only Germans to make the move to this area in that era: “There were others who came round the same time,” Ferdinand confirms.

“Some people in Germany were worried that West Germany was going to be taken over by the Soviet Union because this was at the height of the Cold War and the Berlin Wall had just been built, and some people were worried that everything was going to collapse and they started moving.”

That wasn’t the motivation for his own parents’ move – not that as a seven-year-old he was conscious of much other than the excitement of the change and he and his two sisters (later to be joined by Pia, who was born in Ireland) revelled in it:

“As children we thought it was an adventure. We thought it was great. It was a very different kind of life.

“Back in those days you would take your car to Mullingar and leave your keys in the ignition when you went out shopping; you never locked the house door - ever. Not even at night.

“And then there were interesting things: in Mullingar every Wednesday, I think it was, the town centre was closed because the cattle market was held on the street. There was no self-service in shops, so everywhere you were served behind from behind the counter, even groceries. So we weren’t used to that at all but it was an adventure.

“It seemed a much safer society. Now we know there were dark things happening but that wasn’t our experience, so we thought it was great.

“When I was about seven years old my parents would go into town to do the shopping and I would just wander around Mullingar as a seven-year old. You’d never let a kid do that today. But it was perfectly safe.”

That idyllic period ended in 1968: “The reason we went back to Germany was my father had become bored of farming: he wasn’t a farmer by background. His father and grandfather had run a cement business and that was more in his blood. So after a few years he decided that agriculture as a full-time profession wasn’t for him.”

Ferdinand takes his hat off to him for having given it his best shot: “I kind of admire him: he came over to Ireland and before he came over he read every single textbook that he could get his hands on and actually he was quite good at it.

“When went back to Germany I was homesick for Ireland always,” says Professor von Prondzynski.

“Certainly my older sister and I - all of us to some extent; my youngest sister was actually born in Ireland - we felt Knockdrin was home and we went there every holiday. So we didn’t lose the connection.”

While the family continued to visit, they did not return to live there full-time until 1982, when Hans retired from the cement business. Hans died 23 years ago, but Irene von Prondzynski remained on living in Knockdrin until her death three years ago.

“So he had about 15 years of retirement in Ireland.

“You’d never have thought they were Irish - they always were German and spoke with a German accent - but nevertheless they became very much part of the local Irish scene and enjoyed doing things locally.

“My father was excited to be part of whatever was going on locally and every weekday at 11 he would turn up at Shaw Murray’s café on Church Avenue, where he would have a coffee with Philip Ginnell, the architect, Tom Shaw, the solicitor and the then county manager.”

Hans stood out as he proudly continued wearing his German hat and leather breeches in Mullingar.

While Ferdinand has lived in Ireland or the UK for the majority of his adult life, for his sisters it’s been different: Isabelle lives in Kenya; Pia, who lived for a while in Knockdrin, now lives in Bavaria, and Aglaja stayed on in Germany following her parents’ return to Knockdrin.

At Trinity College, Ferdinand studied law and qualified for the bar, but he has never practised, having opted instead for a career in academia.

“When I graduated from Trinity in 1978 I went to Cambridge and did a PhD there; then I came back and I was a lecturer in Trinity for 10 years and then I went to Hull in England and I was Professor of Law there for 10 years and then I came to DCU and I was president there for 10 years. Then I went to Scotland. So half my career was in Ireland.”

On his first day as a lecturer at Trinity, he met a young English-born English lecturer, Heather Ingman, who was to become his wife. Heather went on to become a professor of English at Trinity, retiring only recently.

While in latter years, up to Heather’s retirement, their careers meant having to live in different countries and catch many flights, they are now able to share a house once more, and that house is set on grounds of eight acres in a rural area outside Aberdeen.

The elder of the couple’s two sons – Sebastian – lives in Aberdeen; their younger son, Theo, lives in London; and since the recent birth of Sebastian’s baby, Ferdinand and Heather are grandparents.

In another life, it’s clear, Professor von Prondzynski might happily have pursued the path of his maternal forebears and made a career in agriculture: “I learnt to drive a tractor when I was nine years old. Right from the start I wanted to do everything on the farm.”

During holidays, he was up early every morning, out on the land: “We used to employ 13 men on the farm and so I would be with them at whatever it was they were doing.”

But, he continues, explaining that Knockdrin is – oddly – both too big and too small for purpose, he opted not to farm: “Although right up to now I love everything to do with the farm, I thought I would pick a career that would not make me dependent on agriculture,” he says.

“I could see the way it was going: it sounds ridiculous but a place that size doesn’t make enough money to make it work and the reason for that is the castle.

“It’s too big to do as a part-time but it is too small to be a thriving business. It falls between the stools a little bit.”

Although the acreage might be large, about half of it is woodland. Since the mid-1990s it has been leased out, and it is farmed as a tillage enterprise.

The von Prondzynskis were the third owners of Knockdrin castle: they bought it from Paddy Dunne-Cullinan, who had in turn bought it from the Levinges in 1940. It was built by Sir Richard Levinge, whose portrait hangs still in the castle hall.

Two Levinge brothers are buried in the woods at Knockdrin: one, Henry, because he committed suicide and thus forfeited the right to be buried in consecrated ground; the second, another Richard, chose to be buried there out of anger at his brother’s exclusion from the cemetery. Some locals claim to have seen Henry’s ghost; not Ferdinand, however.

“The last-but-one [Levinge] owner, also Richard Levinge, was killed in the First World War in France, and his wife died of the Asian flu a couple of years later. Their son [Richard] was left an orphan and at the time his parents died was very young - I think he was still in his early teens. He lived there on his own for a while, although there would have been staff. And when he came of age he left Knockdrin and never returned.

“When we bought Knockdrin he was still alive - he was actually a director of Guinness. And my father met him and they had a very interesting conversation in which Richard was telling him all about the castle back those days and my father said ‘come back and see it now’ but he refused. He said: ‘No, I promised I would never return’.”

Among the Levinge items still left with the house are a vast quantity of books in the library: “I took about one third of them and about two thirds were left there,” says Ferdinand, admitting he suspects that they may have been bought as a job lot and that they were probably mainly for decoration.

“But there were some fascinating books among them and I decided I would take just some books and nearly all of those I took have the Levinge coat of arms on the spine.”