MELOSINA LENOX-CONYNGHAM:MELOSINA LENOX-Conyngham, who has died aged 70, was a writer and a traveller, and to her family, a treasured sister, aunt, cousin and friend. To the wider community, she was a woman whose familiarity with the fading world of the post-colonial expatriate, and of the Irish Big House, allowed her open a window on it for others, occasionally through the obituaries she wrote for The Irish Times.
Her family links to Ireland went back more than eight centuries, with both wings making not insignificant contributions to the rich tapestry of Irish history.
Melosina Anne Lenox-Conyngham, or Melo as she was known to all, was born in 1941 on the Indian Ocean island of Ceylon, then a part of the British Empire, now modern-day Sri Lanka. Her father, Gerald Hamilton Lenox-Conyngham, was a tea planter. The family seat was Springhill House in Moneymore, Co Derry, a 17th century Plantation home with a walled garden.
The house was eventually given to the National Trust and the family no longer lives there – save for the ghost of Olivia, widow of George Lenox-Conyngham, a colonel with the Irish Volunteers who took his own life in 1816.
Melo’s mother was Joanna (Joan) Vernon Butler of Bennettsbridge in Co Kilkenny. Her uncle, Hubert Butler, was an essayist. His talent as a writer, and his eclectic range of interests, from local history and archaeology to the political and religious affairs of eastern Europe, might well have influenced Melo.
The Butler connection no doubt lay behind her attachment to the Butler Society, the group that seeks to bring together around Kilkenny Castle the world-wide Butler community. After moving to Lavistown in the early 1970s, she became its honorary secretary and played a substantial part in helping organise the three-yearly Butler Rally, with members coming from Ireland, the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Spain, Argentina and South Africa.
As befitting a life of travel and adventure, Melo’s began in drama.
When she was barely a year old, the Japanese Carrier Fleet approached Ceylon in an attempt to attack the Royal Navy based in Colombo and Trincomalee. In the panic that ensued, Melo and her mother were put on a ship to Africa – “not a wise decision as a second Japanese carrier fleet was sinking shipping”, as the family noted at her funeral this week.
But it all worked out for the best; they got through and eventually reached Rhodesia, modern-day Zimbabwe, where a brother, Vere, was born in August 1942.
For the next two years, mother and children lived near Durban in South Africa. When they eventually did get a passage back to Ceylon, it was at another dangerous time as German submarines were guarding Indian Ocean ports and so they travelled the length of India by train.
Joan saw to it that the children had an education in Ceylon – in a school that was brought to them by estate workers who carried a thatched wooden building into the garden. Melo passed her memories of the school to her nieces and nephews: Morning Glory grew through the veranda trellis; a pet fish was fed coloured pencils.
At war’s end, the family journeyed to England aboard a huge and overcrowded troopship, 14 squeezed into a two-berth cabin, and from there to Ireland. Melo’s education continued in England – including “dreadful Latin”, as she remembered – and university in Grenoble where her unusual first name was quite familiar to local people. Melosina, she learnt, was the code name for the French atomic bomb.
As a young woman in her 20s, she worked her way round the world. She was for a time a ski bum on Mount Snow in Vermont; a tennis professional for a hotel in Miami; and there was a spell as an escort for minor British royalty in Malaya where, tactfully, she did not point out to her charges that the crowds lining the street were actually a bus queue.
She returned to Ireland on a bus from Kabul, arriving home having learned en route the entire Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám of Edward FitzGerald.
For many years thereafter, she was secretary to Sir Geoffrey Agnew, the dean of London art dealers, who owned a gallery on Old Bond Street.
But the spirit of adventure was never quenched. In later years, she walked with pandas near the Burmese border in China, visited retired headhunters in Nagaland and paddled a canoe to Timbuktu.
In 2001, with her intrepid friend Diana Merrylees, she was prevented by the Pakistan government from visiting the Northwest Frontier and the borders of Tora Bora only days before the American invasion of Afghanistan.
Each adventure resulted in an article or a talk on radio. She was a regular contributor to RTÉ radio’s Sunday Miscellany and to The Irish Times, for which she occasionally wrote an Irishwoman’s Diary (a final diary will be published in Monday’s edition).
She edited a volume, Diaries of Ireland: An Anthology 1590-1987 (Lilliput Press, 1997), a portmanteau collection of 38 writings of, as the publisher put it, “Elizabethan adventurers, fops, soldiers, widows, landlords, republicans, poets, hedge-school masters and literary lesbians [dancing] through 400 years of Irish history”.
Some of her best work for The Irish Times were the life stories of the recently departed which she told with professionalism, style and wit. They were all unsigned, as is her own obituary, but were no less memorable for it.
Her funeral this week in St Canice’s Cathedral in Kilkenny drew some 300 family, friends and admirers. She never married but is survived by her brother Vere, a sister, Eleanor, born in 1946, and by seven nieces and nephews.
Melosina (Melo) Anne Lenox-Conyngham: born February 22nd, 1941; died October 1st, 2011