Hazel Radclyffe-Dolling: Hazel Radclyffe-Dolling, who has died at 84, became an adept television performer in her last decade in order to save her family home, Lissan House near Cookstown, Co Tyrone. She always maintained that it was the Irish country house occupied for the longest time by a single family - nearly 400 years.
Born Hazel Marion Radclyffe Staples, she fought to keep the house habitable, although alone and increasingly pressed for money to do essential repairs.
She agreed two years ago to appear in a BBC series, Restoration, in which viewers chose a building to get Lottery funding. She came a good second, cheered the winner mightily, but was bitterly disappointed.
She had already made the house over to a locally-organised trust, Friends of Lissan House. Its chair, chief executive of Cookstown District Council Michael McGuckan, has promised to continue the preservation effort.
The Staples family set up ironworks and built homes for their workers around the three-storey house in 1620. The core is intact, with additions begun and finished after considerable intervals. For much of the family's existence they lived beyond their means, Radclyffe-Dolling admitted, and were chronically short of money.
They had a reputation locally as good landlords, more than slightly eccentric. She told a winning story about her father's habit of getting up early each morning to catch the postman on his way to the house. She had wondered at the regularity of this habit, until she realised that he had been asking the postman for loans.
Her uncle, Sir Ponsonby Staples, who died in 1943, walked the grounds without shoes and was known as "the barefoot Baronet". He had been a keen Home Ruler, and an artist whose paintings included Gladstone introducing the Home Rule Bill, Cardinal Manning's Reception and The Ideal Cricket Match, which hangs in the Pavilion at Lords.
The present baronet of Lissan, Sir Richard Staples, lives at Lismore, Co Waterford, and is 92. There are no heirs to his 300-acre estate, although the family, Hazel Radclyffe-Dolling included, made an international search using DNA samples.
Lissan House does not go with the title but an heir could influence plans for its future.
A nephew of Sir Richard, Peter Dowd, visited the house regularly: "I was up there last year," he said, "and Hazel was in great form. She really was a lovely woman." It was an opinion widely shared. The late Tony McAuley - singer, folk music collector and skilled raconteur - had been a friend since his childhood, when paddling through the stream that powered Lissan's electricity he met a tall woman who turned out to be the lady of the manor.
The BBC's environment correspondent, Mike McKimm, arrived to interview her about her hope of raising £5 million and returned several times, smitten by her stoicism. He arrived once as she hauled a bottle of gas up the beautiful staircase. In winter she occasionally rose at 5am, she admitted, and went down with a torch to smash the ice around the generator for power to make breakfast. She showed him the prints of her uncle's paintings, originals long sold. She had no fear of burglars. "There's nothing to steal - it's all gone," she said.
Her television appearances were very effective.Taking part in a Halloween collection of "spooky" tales for children, she performed with understatement, eyes still and grand voice keyed down as she described how a supposedly healing crystal, lost during a hospital stay, had turned up six months later in the diningroom on the top floor, sparkling in sunshine under a sideboard.
"I think this house has some peculiar kind of magnetism," she said. "People come back to it. Even things come back to it." In many eyes, Hazel Radclyffe-Dolling was herself magnetic.
Her death notice recorded that she "died peacefully at her beloved home", requested no flowers but suggested donations in lieu if desired for Friends of Lissan Trust. Her husband, Harry H. Dolling, who had been considerably older than her, predeceased her by many years.
Hazel Marion Radclyffe-Dolling (née Staples), born 1922; died April 24th, 2006