FURTHERMORE
By Gerry Moran
This week in honour of International Women’s Day (Saturday, March 8), I proffer profiles of two extraordinary women, one a Kilkenny native who made tennis history, the other made Kilkenny her home and contributed enormously to the cultural and commercial life of our city.
Lady Desart
In 1881, Ellen Odette Bischoffsheim, daughter of a wealthy London banker, married William Cuffe – the fourth Earl of Desart from Kilkenny – in a London society wedding.
William died in 1898 and Ellen, who had no children, moved to Kilkenny and became known as Lady Desart.
When her father died in 1908, Lady Desart became extraordinarily wealthy. In Kilkenny she worked closely with her brother-in-law, Ottway Cuffe, the Fifth Earl of Desart. Thanks to Lady Desart’s fortune, they built a theatre in Patrick Street (now Zunis Restaurant) and, near Talbot’s Inch, where lady Desart lived, they revived the woollen mills, established a tobacco farm, a hosiery factory, a dairy, a school and a woodwork factory.
She also built a village of 26 houses, now Talbot’s Inch, for the factory workers and a footbridge over the River Nore to facilitate the workers getting to and from work.
The Suspension Bridge was swept away in the great flood of 1947 and it was appropriate that Kilkenny’s ‘new’ pedestrian bridge across the River Nore is called The Lady Desart Bridge.
Lady Desart also purchased the site for the Carnegie Library on John’s Quay and furnished the entire building. In memory of her brother-in-law, Otway Cuffe, who died in 1912, she built a hospital near her home in Talbot’s Inch which she called Aut Even, from the Irish Ait Aoibhinn, meaning pleasant place.
In 1910 Lady Desart became the first woman to be conferred with the Freedom of Kilkenny City. In December 1922, Taoiseach WT Cosgrave, made Lady Desart a senator of the Irish Free State and she remained a senator until her death, aged 75, in 1933.
Lady Desart is buried with her husband William in Falmouth cemetery, Cornwall.
Mabel Cahill
Mabel Cahill was born in 1863, the 12th of 13 children, in Ballyragget, and made history by becoming the first non-American, and the only Irish person, to win the US Open Tennis Championship in 1891. Mabel also won the Women’s Doubles the same year. In 1892 Mabel was back as defending champion and made more history by becoming the first player to win the Singles, the Ladies Doubles and Mixed Doubles in the one year.
Mabel’s life, however, was short and sad. Her father, a barrister, was a man of means. Her mother died when Mabel was 12, her father remarried but died within 12 months leaving enough money to give the family a start in life.
Mabel had been introduced to tennis at an early age and in 1884, aged 21, won the Kilkenny City and County Lawn Tennis tournament.
In 1889, aged 26, she emigrated to New York. Her tennis playing caught the attention of the Brooklyn Daily Edge which wrote: “Miss Cahill is a slight, rather delicate-looking girl, yet the severity of her play is the terror of her opponents.”
Having made tennis history in 1892, Mabel did not contest the 1893 tournament due to money problems.
Her father’s inheritance had run out and Mabel, without a profession, turned her hand to romantic novel writing but with little success.
By 1897, aged 34, she was in London where she tried a career in the theatre but without success. Mabel Cahill died in Ormskirk Workhouse near Southport in Lancashire in 1905 in her 42nd year. She was buried in a pauper’s grave with no headstone to mark her resting place.
In 1936 the Irish Lawn Tennis Association placed an ad in the national papers searching for a representative to come forward to accept a Gold Medal struck in honour of Mabel’s achievements in America.
It is not known if the medal was ever collected.
In 1976, in appreciation of her historic tennis records, Mabel was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame.
Once again, after a search, no representative of her family came forward.
