Diana Mansergh died suddenly at the age of 82, active to the end, telephone in one hand, pen in the other. Born Diana Mary Keaton, daughter of the headmaster of Reading Grammar School, grand-daughter of the organist of Peterborough Cathedral, she first came to Tipperary after meeting her husband, the late Nicholas Mansergh, on an Oxford tennis court, after she had come up to Lady Margaret Hall and he was already a fellow of Pembroke.
If their marriage in December 1939 determined the subsequent direction of her life, the vigour, the purpose, and the quality she brought to everything she did came from her own depth of character and sense of style. Quintessentially English in the best sense, she eagerly embraced the new Irish dimension of her identity, serving both countries selflessly for the rest of her life as she crossed back and forth between them.
Working as a civil servant in London during the war, she chose to have the first of her five children delivered in the Rotunda. She brought the growing family on frequent summer holidays to Kerry and Connemara, returning herself in later life to seek inspiration for her painting from her joy in the country around Clifden and Renvyle. She modernised the old Mansergh family home at Friarsfield, continuing to serve her Church as a highly participatory member of St Mary's Parish Church in Tipperary town, as she served on the Synod of Ely in Cambridgeshire. Nor did she leave her tennis shoes behind when she crossed the Irish Sea, representing Cambridge at county level, and taking the hard court championship of Munster four times.
Her children's lives bridged the Irish Sea too, with Philip and Jane working in England, Martin and Nicholas, and now Daphne, in Ireland.
When her husband became the first Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at Cambridge in 1953, and then Master of his college, St John's, from 1969 until 1979, they came to form one of the great partnerships of the university world. St John's is a big college, a challenge for even her impressive talents as organiser and hostess. But she brought to the task of making all members, undergraduates, graduates and fellows, and not least the Irish among them, feel a sense of belonging, the same imagination and dedication she brought to the refurbishing of Friarsfield.
She shared in her husband's scholarly work at home and abroad, as he composed book after book, article after article, lecture after lecture, on the Commonwealth, India, South Africa and Ireland, all stamped with that rare blend of academic and emotional intelligence that make this remarkable intellectual enterprise rank among the great scholarly achievements of the century. She compiled the indexes to the books, a timeconsuming and grossly underrated skill. She checked and double-checked sources - and for an oeuvre of not only such scale, but such scrupulous integrity, checking could never be too thorough. She read the proofs. She counselled on drafts, seeking to clarify sentence structures that could verge on the excessively complex, as he strove with passionate fair-mindedness to fashion a style that would render precisely the infinite nuances of tone, temper and thought inherent in Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Indian relations.
She did more. When his death in 1991 brought their partnership on earth to an end - her firm faith inspired her serene confidence that they would be reunited in heaven - she devoted much of her remaining years to her vocation as his literary executor. She saw the manuscript of his last book, The Unresolved Question; The Anglo- Irish Settlement and its Undoing 1912-72 - as wise a work as has ever been penned on a subject as dear to her heart as to his - through Yale University Press in 1991. She then collected and edited several of his scattered writings in two volumes. The first, Nationalism and Independence: Selected Irish Papers, including unpublished extracts from his diary of the 1930s, was published in 1997 by Cork University Press. The second, Independence Years: The Selected Indian and Commonwealth Papers of Nicholas Mansergh, was published by Oxford University Press in New Delhi in 1999.
When her son Martin chose a reading at the Thanksgiving Service for her life, he selected Proverbs 31:10-31 - remarking that it was one of the few tributes in Scripture to the entrepreneurial and managerial talents of women. Those qualities, with which she was blessed in abundance, were directed to innumerable practical ways of doing good. And when the Dean of Cashel closed the Thanksgiving in St Mary's with a tribute to the good and faithful servant, he expressed the essence of a life given to unceasing service - service to four generations of family, to church, to college, to scholarship, and to the two countries she loved so well.
J.L.