Jane O'Malley, who died on February 4th, 1999, was the first woman to hold the post of executive secretary of the Royal Irish Academy. She was Irish by extraction and inclination, but English by birth and upbringing. She was born in London on August 9th, 1914, the eldest child of Owen St Clair O'Malley of the British Foreign Office, whose grandfather had left Castlebar in the 1820s. She was christened Diana Sabina, but always known as Jane. She was educated mainly at home by her mother.
In 1926 her father was appointed British Counsellor at Peking, in the turbulent period of the warlords. Jane loved China, for the austere beauty of its landscape, the excitements of Legation life, and for the little Chinese horses that she raced across the dusty winter fields; but China sprang a nasty surprise and it was discovered in 1928 that she had a tubercular kidney. It was successfully removed and in later life she would proudly say: "Really I've no business to be here!" In 1932 her mother, writing as Ann Bridge, shot to fame with her novel Peking Picnic, which launched her on a long and successful career as a novelist.
In 1934 Jane went up to Oxford and read politics, philosophy and economics at Lady Margaret Hall. She took her BA and her MA. On her father's appointment as Minister to Mexico in 1937 she went with him, instead of her busy mother, as his official hostess. This gave her social confidence to match her intellectual ability. She flowered as she had been unable to do at home in the shadow of her brilliant, scene-stealing mother. Mexican affairs took an exciting turn when Mexico nationalised its oil fields and broke off diplomatic relations with Great Britain. Jane heard the news in Dallas, where she had flown with a diplomatic bag as possibly the first ever woman to act as King's Messenger.
In 1939 she accompanied her father as his secretary and hostess when he was posted as Minister to Budapest. She ran a news bulletin out of the British Legation from the outbreak of the war until June 1940, when she dashed back to England through France, four days ahead of the Germans, to be "where the action was", and saw out the London Blitz as an Air Raid Warden and working for the magazine Time and Tide.
Jane never married, but during the war she espoused the tragic cause of Poland. She added Polish to her French, German, Magyar and Spanish, and translated Wojciech Chelkowski's The Buried Standard, an account of the September 1939 campaign. After the war, in 1946, she was commissioned to write a series of articles for the Sunday Times on the Russian-occupied countries of Eastern Europe, and became one of a handful of journalists who were known as "The Balkan Women". She never fulfilled her promise as a journalist; her standards were high, some would say impossibly high, and for Jane there were "too many lies" in journalism.
She was in her thirties before she ever saw County Mayo, but there she found "something waiting" that she had not found anywhere else. Its mountains, sea and islands gave her a substantial sense of consolation, and among its people she felt a deep sense of belonging and delight. This was also a time of spiritual conflict, which was resolved when she was received into the Roman Catholic Church; Jane was not one to yield herself, and her submission was not sentimental but intellectual.
After five years at Rossyvera, on Clew Bay, she went back to London in 1951, cherishing her dream to return. She became the editor of the high-quality journals produced by the pharmaceutical firm May and Baker. It was pleasant and rewarding work, but in 1964 she found the opportunity she had been looking for, and she moved to Dublin to become executive secretary at the Royal Irish Academy, the first woman in its history of almost 200 years to hold the post.
Jane brought to bear on whatever she did a fierce, meticulous, and uncompromising intelligence and a steely determination. She was a formidable and demanding colleague. She would make "a nourishing snack" of anyone who did not do their job efficiently, but she commanded the confident affection and respect of her friends and neighbours. She kept people at arm's length, and yet felt passionately and strongly about them. When she gave her friendship she gave it fully and actively - friends were "people you do things for". She was a stimulating companion, with a lively, succinct tongue, and a memorable turn of phrase. She was independent, honest, canny, direct, a shrewd and perceptive judge of character. Anything, or anyone, sham or bogus was abhorrent to her. Her sense of injustice was very finely tuned. Her character and upbringing by strong, destructive parents had combined to make her life tempestuous with anger and anxiety, but the gleam of her absolute integrity shone through the gusts and invited liking.
She spent the last 25 years of her life in Mayo. She died with acceptance and dignity, sustained by her faith, and is buried close to where she lived, at Burrishoole where she felt she belonged. In words from her own "Fiodan Mor":
Time runs away, but not the hills;
And this beloved mountain
Shall at the end a gravestone stand
Over my life's stilled fountain.
B.S.