ROSEMARY GARVEY:AT THE very end of the twisting road to the mouth of Killary harbour, sustained by a swarm of friends and neighbours and helpers, the legendary Rosemary Garvey lived on, feeble in body at 92, her mind overflowing with treasures. Generations of her families, busy in the wide world, visited the Mayo cottage regularly.
There were two families. Her first husband was Sir Con O’Neill, and her second, Sir Terence of Murrisk, along the road to Westport. Ms Garvey made sure the two families were one, and it was her daughter Onora O’Neill who was summoned from her bed to hear her last loving words this week.
Garvey’s father was a hugely successful London doctor; her mother was from a Glasgow shipping family whose coasters traded around Ireland.
Her father’s death at the outbreak of the second World War brought an end to her Oxford education, so she went into government service, among the young women who filled the places left empty by the men who went off to fight. Her brother was killed over Denmark, returning from a bombing raid. She married Con, and they had two children, Onora and Rowan, who died in his 40s.
She worked at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, home of Britain’s main decryption establishment, the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS), where ciphers and codes of several Axis countries were decrypted, significantly altering the course of the war. There, Garvey looked after the team of mathematicians and linguists who broke the German naval codes. Many of them had escaped from Germany; she spoke their language, had visited their country on school trips, and knew well what Hitler meant. At the war’s end, she went as part of the British transitional government of the defeated nation, and married a member of that team, Dublin-born Terence Garvey, uniting his three children with her own.
Terence Garvey never gave up his Irish passport as he rose through the British diplomatic service.
Together the couple served in Yugoslavia, where she learned to admire Marshal Tito while befriending his critics; not many foreign diplomats in Belgrade spoke Serbo-Croat well enough for that. They were in Cairo when the British bombed the city; the Egyptians, she said, were courteous towards their diplomatic guests.
In their next posting, as British ambassador in China, she confessed that she acquired only enough Chinese to run the embassy household. But she sat at dinner next to chairman Mao, and when the talk grew sticky prime minister Zhou Enlai winked at her.
She had charm, and the wit to know when an ambassador’s wife should intervene, and when not. Those gifts equipped her for his return as head of mission to Yugoslavia, with Tito still an admiring friend; Garvey saw how he won over his experimental guest, Princess Margaret, sent to test the water for the Queen’s first trip to a Communist state.
Then it was to New Delhi, where she alarmed her high-caste official acquaintances by helping to educate outcaste children. Then Moscow; her Russian was pretty good by then, and the British embassy sits high on the bank of the Moskva river, overlooking the Kremlin.
All this time the Garveys kept faith with Sir Terence’s Irish roots. They worked on an intriguing history of his family (Kilkenny to Murrisk, a family history; Westport, 1992). It told the story of an Irish family who co-operated with, but never bowed down to, their British masters, who gave them in the 1580s the lands of the Augustinian friars around Murrisk Abbey.
The ancestral house was beyond their means, but the modest converted farm at Dadreen was always home. When Terence died in 1986, Rosemary stayed on.
Her neighbours rallied to help her when the scything winds off Mweelrea mountain blocked the brown bog stream that brought them water. Ethna and Michael Viney, a mile inland up the twisting road, were good to her, and so were others too numerous to name.
She welcomed visits by eminent and learned old colleagues, loved successive Border collies, and enriched the lives of those who knew how to listen with memories and flashes of wisdom from the days when she was someone whose role in two wars (one bloody, one Cold) helped to sustain the world’s fragile peace.
To the end she welcomed recordings of half a dozen weekly magazines, which kept her up-to-date with that world. Last month she finished, with great enjoyment, Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s book Young Stalin.
She could not really see to unpack the tapes, and played them dreadfully loud as her hearing deteriorated, but she was always keen to denounce the latest crazy invasion, whoever launched it.
She was beloved, and she lies alongside Terence amid the ruins of Murrisk Abbey.
Rosemary Garvey: born September 19th, 1918; died August 17th, 2011