Author has led life as fascinating as subjects of her books

The life of Mary Anne Tyrrell, as depicted in the book A Miserable Thing To Be A Woman, is fascinating but no more so than the life of the author, Lesley Whiteside.

In an interview with the Examiner on the occasion of the launch of this, her latest book, Lesley, who has written 20 books, recounted some of the jobs she has had.

She was once assistant keeper of Manuscripts at Trinity College, Dublin, and responsible for the national treasure, the Book of Kells. In the 1960s, it was restored and rebound in the four volumes of the gospels and when the gospels on display were rotated, Lesley and one college porter had to carry them across a lawn in a leather case. “That was the extent of the security,” she mused.

Lesley married Robert Whiteside, who was a teacher in The King’s Hospital School, in 1968. The following year, the headmaster asked her to write the history of the school for its tercentenary in 1975. She set to work, exploring the excellent school archives, the city archives and resources at the National Library.

Before the 1975 deadline, Robert and Lesley had three children – two girls and a boy, born in 1971, 1973 and 1974. “It was a challenge to have the book ready,” Lesley laughs. After that, she laid down her pen for several years.

Most of her subsequent books were commissioned, the exception being her biography of the former Church of Ireland primate, George Otto Simms.

In 1985, Robert was appointed Warden of Wilson’s Hospital School in Multyfarnham “and we moved lock, stock and barrel with him”, Lesley recalled.

The following year, over lunch with Archbishop Simms and his wife, Mercy, it was decided that Lesley would write his biography. “He was one of those Irish-speaking Church of Ireland bishops who embraced the new state and ecumenism and I thought his leadership of the Church should be told,” she said.

Published in 1990, for the bishop’s 80th birthday, the book was ‘a labour of love’.

At the same time, Lesley was working as archivist for the diocese of Meath and Kildare, and she was asked to organise a survey of the churches and their contents. Having trained volunteers for each church, she soon discovered that they all had difficulties in listing the stained glass windows so she had to learn about them quickly. That led to commissions for two books on stained glass.

Before Archbishop Simms died, he asked Lesley to compile a collection of his Saturday devotional columns in the Irish Times (Thinking Aloud), which he had written for nearly 50 years. The publisher, Columba Press, then commissioned books on St Patrick and St Columba and a number of guides to stained glass appeared in the following years.

After her husband died in 2006, Lesley undertook another commission, in conjunction with their son, Andrew, for a history of Kilkenny College and its constituent schools. They moved on to write a book on past pupils of The King’s Hospital, who had served and died in WWI.

That involved visiting cemeteries on the site of the Western Front to view the graves of casualties.

Arising from that, Seamus O’Brien, editor of the Journal of the Westmeath Archaeological and Historical Society, Iarmhí, asked Leslie to write an essay on ‘A Westmeath family at the Western Front’ (the Purdons of Lisnabin) for the 2016-17 edition, then a chapter on ‘Church of Ireland parish and people, 1897-1996’ for Westmeath History and Society, the large tome in the series of Irish county histories published under the general editorship of William Nolan.

It was when she retired in 2014 that Lesley got involved in archives of the Monksgrange estate in Wexford, on which she is still working. Monksgrange was the grange (out farm) of the monks of Graiguenamanagh and its owner, Jeremy Hill, is a cousin of the late Robert Whiteside.

Working in the Monksgrange archives led to contact with Professor Terry Dooley, who runs the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates at Maynooth University. “Terry invited me to speak at some of their annual conferences” and subsequently she was invited to submit a number of essays for the Journal of the County Kildare Archaeological Society.

One of those was on the farm journal of the Holt family of Carbury, tenant farmers on the former Colley estate. “It is full of handwritten notes on the day-to-day details of the farm and is fascinating,” Lesley said.

Next, she was asked to do something on the Church of Ireland in Carbury, so she wrote the history of the church from its origins to 1775, but then decided she wanted to do a study of farming and society in Carbury.

Lesley’s friend, David Clarke, who sadly died last year, also had a farm on the Colley estate. “He was brilliant with maps and could interpret them in detail,” she remarked.

It was towards the end of writing that book, Farming and society since 1700 in the barony of Carbury, County Kildare, (published in 2024), that Lesley became aware of the private archive at Ballinderry House, owned by Alan and Eleanor Cox. “We got on very well and they asked me to put their archives in order,” Lesley recalled.

It was while going through those archives and digitising them that Lesley discovered Mary Anne Tyrrell, the subject of her latest book, ‘A Miserable Thing To Be A Woman’, launched last week. “I think this is my last book. It is possibly number 20,” Lesley said.

Lesley’s son, Andrew, and her two daughters, Clodagh and Heather, all live in the Mullingar area. She also has eight grandchildren. She lives in the home the family bought in 1986 on the Baltrasna Boreen, just outside Mullingar. When we spoke to Lesley, she and all the family were busy preparing for the launch. “It’s all hands on deck,” she chuckled.