INTERVIEW:Dorothea Findlater was seven years old when her father drove around Republican strongholds in Dublin urging commandants to heed Pádraig Pearse's surrender. Now, at 101, she looks back at that week in 1916 and at her long, full life, writes TURTLE BUNBURY
STANDING ON the summit of the Curragh’s Victorian red-brick water tower with her mother and nanny, the seven-year-old girl stared north across the plains of Kildare and watched the dark clouds billowing over Dublin city into the blue Easter skies above. She was perhaps too young to understand what was happening. Then again, who did? “Sinn Féin Rising reported in Dublin” were the chilling words her father wrote in his diary shortly before he departed for the city.
And now her father, Captain Harry de Courcy-Wheeler, was somewhere in the thick of it. In fact, even as Dorothea Findlater watched, the captain was driving his black Ford through the streets of Dublin, bullets and bombs whizzing all around him. In his passenger seat was nurse Elizabeth O’Farrell, the Holles Street midwife who delivered Pearse’s surrender note. The duo drove from one Republican stronghold to the next, urging the commandants within to heed the surrender.
Many years later, the captain organised a turf-cutting competition in the Bog of Allen which was opened by Éamon de Valera, the only leader who did not surrender directly to him that day. “I’m a lucky man,” Dev told him. “Any leader who surrendered to you was executed.”
Perhaps the most awkward arrest Wheeler made was of Countess Markievicz, his wife’s first cousin. He kept her Mauser gun as a trophy, along with various other rebel handguns and a Singer sewing machine used to make Volunteer uniforms in Liberty Hall. The family gifted the lot to the State on the 50th anniversary of the Rising in 1966 and they are now on display in the National Museum.
Fast forward 94 Easters and Findlater Findlater chuckles sweetly at the immensity of that week. “He hated fighting against his countrymen,” she insists. “He was put in charge of [James] Connolly and told to shoot him if he moved. I remember asking him if he would actually have shot him. ‘I would not,’ he said – and he meant it.”
There is no doubt that Findlater is one of the very last links between the present century and that remarkably ordered but lopsided society that prevailed in the latter days of British-run Ireland.
Her ancestry is rich. Both her grandfather and uncle were presidents of the Royal College of Surgeons. Her grandmother was a first cousin of George Bernard Shaw.
Science and literature aside, the sporty gene was arguably the strongest in her blood. Her father won the high stone wall championship at the Dublin Horse Show in 1904. Her mother and two aunts played hockey for Ireland. Her uncle, Jack Knox, played rugby for Ireland, most notably against the All Blacks in 1906.
Findlater’s passion for rugby is absolute. Pride of place on her mantelpiece is taken by a large signed photo of Peter Stringer, which the Munster man sent her as a birthday present. “There is no one like Stringer for whipping a ball out of a scrum,” she sighs.
Findlater represented Ireland in both hockey and golf. She recently was made an honorary member of Carrickmines Golf Club and is frequently to be seen on the club’s putting green, competing for the Seniors’ Cup.
Her childhood was spent in Robertstown House on the Bog of Allen in Co Kildare. “There were six of us [children] so we didn’t really need anyone else,” she recalls. “There was always someone to play with, to swim in the canal or ride a horse or play tennis or hockey.”
The nearby village of Robertstown “was very go-ahead in my day”, she says. “It had everything. A tailor, a shoemaker, a bakery, a police station, a post office and a hotel.
“I didn’t go to school,” she says. “I wasn’t educated.” That is not entirely true. The family lived at the Curragh Camp for the duration of the first World War, where she was taught by a series of governesses and devoured her father’s library.
“I read all the classics,” she wistfully recalls. In between perusing the pages, she watched thousands of young soldiers being drilled and trained before they headed off to the trenches of the Western Front. A few years ago, she journeyed back to see the Curragh Camp. “The place where we lived hadn’t changed at all,” she marvels.
After the war, the family returned to Robertstown and she began cycling to the nearby rectory where canon Greening helped her to become the first female member of her family to make it into Trinity College Dublin.
In 1932, her last year at Trinity, she married Dermot Findlater, head of the celebrated Dublin merchant family and a highly regarded hockey goalkeeper to boot. They had two sons and three daughters.
During the 1930s, she was a director of Bulmers in Clonmel. She played an active role in the second World War with the Foxrock branch of the St John’s Ambulance Corps. “We drove to Westland Row and collected refugees who had been bombed out of their homes in Liverpool. We fed them, washed them and drove them to stay with friends.”
After the war, she became a director of the Belfast Empire, the now defunct theatre once famous for its variety shows and charity performances. One of her roles was to look after the celebrities who attended gala performances, such as Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Mary Pickford and countess Mountbatten.
The Findlaters’ stylish charity luncheons in the firm’s headquarters in O’Connell Street were top of the social agenda for many: Micheál Mac Liammóir, Hilton Edwards and Cyril Cusack being among the “terrific characters” who attended. Findlater also raised a good deal of money for the Adelaide Hospital with her coffee mornings.
Last December, Findlater received her centenarian’s medal from President Mary McAleese. She attributes her venerable age – and glow – to nutrition: “I have always had fresh fruit and vegetables in the garden.” She ventures out to her garden virtually every day and, as her son Alex puts it, “she’ll still tell the gardener to hold the ladder while she goes up it”. Shrugging modestly, she adds: “I go on the theory that what you did yesterday, you can do today.”
Alex Findlater’s book Findlaters: The Story of a Dublin Merchant Family was published by AA Farmar in 2001
