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Irish poet, novelist, playwright and biographer and one of the leading figures of the early 20th-century Irish Literary Revival.

Rosemarie Cockayne was born Rosemarie Edwina Biggers on 4 November 1943 in Montreal, Canada. Her parents were Harold Edwin Biggers (1900-1979), a barrister and political journalist from Australia, and Evelyn Linda née Cockayne (1906-1980), an English-born commercial artist who had emigrated to Australia with her mother and sister in 1913. In 1944, the Biggers family returned from Canada to London, where Rosemarie’s parents had lived for some years prior to her birth.

Rosemarie was educated at Miss Ironside’s School for Girls in Kensington, London. Her interest in the performing arts emerged at an early age. When she was seven years old, she took mime lessons with the legendary Russian prima ballerina Tamara Karsavina (1885-1978), who quickly spotted Rosemarie’s aptitude for dance. She recommended her to the Polish ballet master Stanislas Idzikowski (1894-1977), and it was under his tutelage that Rosemarie took the first steps towards her future career. While continuing to study at her day school, she furthered her dance training at the Royal Ballet School. She appeared in ballet and opera productions at Covent Garden and, in 1958, was given a role as Miriam in the film Drawn from the Nile. Having left the Royal Ballet School, Rosemarie became a ballet soloist and later a ballerina at the Basle State Ballet in Switzerland under the direction of Waslaw Orlikowsky. It was at around this time that she assumed her mother’s maiden name as her stage name.

While living and working in Switzerland, Rosemarie developed an interest in painting. She adopted expressionism and its vibrant use of strong colours as her dominant style. She returned to England to study painting at Saint Martin’s School of Art and at Morley College in London. To fund her studies, she continued dancing and took up fashion modelling aided by her mother, who drew fashion illustrations for the stores in Kensington and Knightsbridge. Rosemarie held her first exhibition at Clarges Gallery, London in February 1972. For the next thirty years, she exhibited her work widely in England and internationally in Sweden, Canada, and Brazil. In addition, she produced company logos, record sleeves, and stage designs, most notably sets and costumes for Dublin City Ballet’s productions.

Later in her artistic career, Rosemarie Cockayne combined her love of art with her deep interest in people and the environment. She began to do voluntary work with children, the homeless, and the disabled as Artist in Residence for several community groups, running art workshops and sitting at committees concerned with art and education. Among the charities she collaborated with were Field Lane, The Pembroke Centre, and Providence Row. Her work with the city’s charities was honoured in 2000 with the Freedom of the City of London.

Rosemarie Cockayne died after a long illness on 3 February 2015. Her funeral was held at the church of St John the Baptist in Kensington, and her ashes interred at the church of St John the Baptist in the parish of Cockayne Hatley in Bedfordshire alongside her parents.

For a full biography of Thomas Clarke, please refer to the Dictionary of Irish Biography, https://www.dib.ie/biography/clarke-thomas-james-tom-a1713.

For a full biography of Kathleen Clarke, please refer to the Dictionary of Irish Biography, https://www.dib.ie/biography/clarke-kathleen-caitlin-bean-ui-chleirigh-a1707.

Barbara Clarke was born in Dublin in 1938. She started dancing at the age of four at the Burchill School of Dancing on St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, where she studied both ballet and tap. Her first stage appearance was in the Burchill School of Dancing Recital at the Gaiety Theatre in 1943 at the age of five. From the very beginning, she showed exceptional talent and enthusiasm, and steadily built up her skills by undertaking dance and teaching qualifications. As she progressed, she began to help Miss Burchill with the younger classes and continued to participate in the school’s regular recitals at the Gaiety Theatre. As there was no full-time work for dancers in Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s, Barbara trained as secretary at Alexandra College, Dublin, and worked in that capacity for a firm of stockbrokers in the city. She dedicated her spare time to dance, both as a performer and a choreographer, and gained countrywide publicity through her appearances in RTÉ’s popular programme, Shall We Dance?. She continued her involvement in the art form until 1992, when a stroke called a halt to her active dancing career.

Austin Clarke was one of the leading poets of the post-Yeats generation best known for his exceptional style which combined the English language with the rhythm of traditional Irish-language poetry. His published poetic works include The Vengeance of Fionn (1917), Night and Morning (1938) and Ancient Lights (1955). Clarke also wrote plays, novels and two volumes of memoirs.

Chrysalis Dance is Ireland’s only neoclassical dance company, combining in its choreographies sophisticated classical ballet with sleekly modern elements of contemporary dance. The company emerged from a workshop held in June 2003 under the direction of Judith Sibley at Shawbrook School of Dance, County Longford to commence the research and development of an original neoclassical work. The company premiered its first work, Strings, in the Black Box, Galway in April 2004. Since then, Chrysalis Dance has toured Ireland with several well-received choreographies and has enjoyed sell-out runs at national dance festivals. The company has been resting since losing its Arts Council funding in 2013.

For a full biography of Roger Casement, please refer to the Dictionary of Irish Biography, https://www.dib.ie/biography/casement-sir-roger-david-a1532.

The O’Carrolls of Lissenhall were an old Irish Catholic family and prosperous landowners in county Tipperary. During the era of penal laws they conformed to the established religion to ensure the retention of their estates and, in a further process of Anglicisation, removed the ‘O’ and the last ‘l’ from their surname.

Perhaps the most famous of the eighteenth-century Carrols was Lieutenant-General William Parker Carrol (1776-1842), whose distinguished military career earned him a knighthood in 1816. Originally trained as a lawyer, he joined the army as a volunteer at the commencement of war with France in 1794. By 1800, he had risen to the rank of Captain and was posted to a fencible regiment in Gibraltar, where he learnt to speak fluent Spanish. Six years later, Carrol distinguished himself as part of the ill-fated British expedition against Buenos Aires. He frequently volunteered in dangerous and difficult situations and his knowledge of Spanish proved to be an essential service to the army. During the Peninsular War, he took part in 28 different engagements and was decorated by both the British and Spanish no less than twelve times. When his father died in 1816, Carrol retired from the army and took over the management of the family seat Tulla, county Tipperary. A year later, he married Emma-Sophia Sherwill (1799-1819) and by her had two children, William Hutchinson Carrol (1817-1895) and John Egerton Carrol (1819-1852). He resumed his army career in 1821 and was posted to Malta and later to the Ionian Islands, but, having contracted malaria, was forced to return home in 1830. He died at Tulla on 2 June 1842.

Carrol’s elder son, William Hutchinson Carrol (1817-1895), followed his father into the army, reaching the rank of Captain in the Iniskilling Dragoons. Upon his father’s death in 1842, he assumed responsibility of the family estate in Tulla, which his father’s long absences had left in some disarray, with large debts. In 1853, Captain Carrol purchased Lissenhall near Nenagh, county Tipperary, its demesne and several other adjoining tracts of land through the Incumbered Estates Commission. At the time of sale, Thomas Dagg was a tenant in Lissenhall and an arrangement was made for him to rent the house and demesne. This arrangement suited Captain Carrol as he at the time had not sufficient funds to undertake a relocation to Lissenhall. This turned out to be a mixed blessing however, for when in 1869 Carrol was in a position to move from Tulla to the larger house in Lissenhall, Thomas Dagg refused to move. The legal position was not resolved until 1873.

In December 1862 Captain Carrol married Elizabeth (Bessie) Leslie Griffin (d. 1887) and the couple had six children of whom one only survived six weeks. Carrol died in 1895, and the family estates passed to his only surviving son, Egerton Griffin Carrol, who died just 15 months later. The responsibility for the management of the estate was left to his three sisters, Alice Isabel (1865-1940), Maud Rose (1865-1942) and Florence Kate (1871-1935), but it was Alice who bore the bulk of it. Her succession to the management of the Lissenhall estate came about at a time when the Land Acts came into force. As the estate’s holdings eroded through the sale of lands to its former tenants, the difficulty of keeping the enterprise afloat grew increasingly complex. Alice had on-running interactions with her solicitors concerning The National Income Tax Recovery Agency, The Irish Land Commission and Lloyds Insurance. By the 1920s she also had to contend with thefts of her stock and equipment and threats to her safety by the IRA. By this time, she had to bow to the inevitable and oversaw the disposal of Lissenhall house and demesne to the Land Commission and eventually left the property in 1922. Alice continued to live in Nenagh, county Tipperary until 1927 before moving to England. She died unmarried on 23 January 1940.

Maude Rose Carrol, the second daughter of William Hutchinson, married in June 1902 George Maxwell Angas, a gentleman farmer and a consummate horseman from Yorkshire. The couple lived at the Manor Farm, Wissendine, Rutland until 1910, when they moved into Lissenhall in order that George could better manage a farm he owned nearby. During the following years and up to the time Lissenhall was vacated he was of considerable help to Alice in the management of the Lissenhall estate. However, the Angas family left Lissenhall in 1922 in the face of continuing unrest in the area. The couple’s daughter Rosaleen married Paul Johan Tausch (1899-1967), a skiing instructor from Austria and the couple made their home in The White House, Coggeshall, Essex.

Florence Kate Carrol, the youngest of William Hutchinson’s daughters, eneoyed greater freedom than her elders sisters. Outstanding in amateur theatricals and an exceptional equestrian, she found a perfect partner in Philip Clement Scott (1871-1932), son of Clement Scott, the influential English theatre critic, playwright and travel writer. Philip’s mother Isabel du Maurier was aunt to the actor Gerald du Maurier, whose daughter Daphne du Maurier reaped international fame as a writer. Florence and Philip’s only child, Anthony Gerald O’Carroll Scott (1899-1980) spent his boyhood at Lissenhall and was particularly close to his Maude and Alice during his parents’ extended absences. Like so many of his ancestors, he enjoyed a long and varied military career. His wife, Helena Gertrude James (1899-1984), whom he married in August 1926, was to follow him on each and every posting during his career. Their only child, June Mary O’Carrol Scott was born in 1928. She and her husband, James Robertson (1920-2000), an officer in the Guards Armoured Division, both trained as teachers following James’s retirement from the army in 1964. June taught at primary level in a number of locations over the next twenty years. She is the author of A Long Way from Tipperary (1994), which traced the history of her father’s Irish ancestors, and of Only Remember the Laughter (2005), an account of her own life story. In 2002, having become a widow and with no children of her own, she donated the Carroll family papers and memorabilia to Limerick Civic Trust.