Читать книгу The Life and Times of Mary Ann McCracken, 1770–1866 - Mary McNeill - Страница 3

Mary Alice McNeill (1897–1984) was born in Belfast and educated at Richmond Lodge and St Hugh’s College, Oxford. She lost a brother during the Great War and so returned to Ireland to work at a soldiers’ home. After graduating from Alexandra College Dublin, McNeill was assistant editor of the volume The Voice of Ireland (1923). Returning to Belfast in the mid-1920s, she became a member of the Arellian Association, which established a nursery school for the city’s poor children in 1928 – nearly 100 years after Mary Ann McCracken established a nursery school in the Poor House.

McNeill dedicated her life to numerous voluntary projects. She was Secretary for the Irish Christian Fellowship; Honorary Secretary for the Northern Committee of the Irish Association for Cultural, Economic and Social Relations (1938-53); Women’s Voluntary Services District Organiser in Belfast during the Second World War, advancing to Second Vice-Chairman of the Northern Ireland Branch, and she was nominated as a Children’s Guardian in 1943.

Following in the footsteps of her father and grandfather, McNeill served on the Board of the Belfast Charitable Society (1945–64). Working as an independent scholar, she published her first historical biography, The Life and Times of Mary Ann McCracken, in 1960. Having declined an MBE in 1953, McNeill went on to accept an Honorary M.A. from Queen’s University Belfast in 1961. She published two further biographies: Little Tom Drennan (1962) and Vere Foster (1971).

McNeill died on 25 October 1984, leaving a valuable collection of miniatures and silhouettes to the National Gallery of Ireland, and a significant bequest to the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University Belfast.