Kildare woman publishes book after 90th birthday

ONE of Kildare’s unsung forces of nature has just published a seventh book – on the far side of her 90th birthday.

Dr Barbara Walsh from Kildangan has just published Caught on Air: Stories of Life from Mid-20th Century Ireland.

Barbara is so down with the modern ways, has only released a digital edition at this stage.

“Before I was a historian I had five kids,” she starts modestly, before alluding to her time as a broadcaster, producer, writer and even artist (under her maiden name Barbara Haycock). 

“I used to write short stories for RTÉ and the BBC to be used on the radio in the late 60s and early 70s,” she said.

“There were 16 of them in all, and I thought I still have them here, and thought I should present them, and a friend said I should put them on Kindle, because in this day and age, they’re never off their screens!” she laughed.

"Caught on the Air is available on Amazon, and it all the 16 that were broadcast.

“If you log in, it gives a nice flavour of my life then (in her late 30s),” she said.

“I’m over 90 now, and I’m 25 years in Kildangan – the longest I’ve ever lived in a place in my life,” she revealed.

“I use a stick, but I can still drive,” she said.

Coincidentally, Barbara moved to Kildangan the same year she got her doctorate (PhD, Lancaster University in 1999) – when she was 65!

“The PhD I did when I retired, and I would recommend that to people, to do when they retire something they couldn’t do earlier in life,” she said.

Her previous publications cover a disparate range of topics, covering nuns, a pilot, women at war – and Woolworths.

“My thesis was about women from Ireland who went off as nuns in the 19th and 20th centuries.

“They wanted to go, but couldn’t get out, so the only way to travel and see the world was this, even if it only got them to Birmingham!” The pilot was a Hubert Latham, who was a rival of French flyer Louis Bleriot in the somewhat underhand challenge to win the Daily Mail’s £1,000 offered to first man to fly the English Channel.

“He was a very distant relation – my uncle saw him fly – but he had French and British blood in him,” said Barbara.

“He was a rival to Bleriot but there were some dirty tricks going on, he had to ditch his plane, but until Bleriot did it (on 25 July 1909], there were all sorts of funny tricks going on around Latham,” she said.

“My mother was a telephonist during World War One (which ended only 16 years before Barbara’s birth).

"I really wanted to look into their lives in Servicewomen in the Great War,” she said.

“There was not one class, or religion who went,” she noted.

And the Woolworths?

“My father worked in Woolworths, everybody knew a Woolworths – there was one on every Irish main street,” she said.