PAPERS OF FRANCES-MARY BLAKE P244 UCD ARCHIVES
[email protected] www.ucd.ie/archives T + 353 1 716 7555 © 2018 University College Dublin. All Rights Reserved ii CONTENTS CONTEXT Biographical History iv Archival History iv CONTENT AND STRUCTURE Scope and Content v System of Arrangement vi CONDITIONS OF ACCESS AND USE Access vii Language vii Finding Aid vii DESCRIPTION CONTROL Archivist’s Note vii iii CONTEXT Biographical history Frances-Mary Blake was born in London on 29th March 1939 and lived in Rickmansworth, on the north-west outskirts of London, later moving to nearby Chorleywood. While her father, Charles, was British, her mother, Mollie, was Irish and Frances inherited from her a love of Ireland. As a child she visited Ireland frequently. She worked at various jobs in her early adulthood, including working in a library, in broadcasting, as a purser on the Cunard lines, with the publisher W.H. Allen and also with the British Waterways Board. However, it was as a writer that she found her passion and this was particularly evident on the topic of the Irish revolutionary period, and on the life of anti-Treaty IRA commandant and writer Ernie O’Malley in particular. Due to this interest, in the mid-1970s she helped with the initial sorting and cataloguing of the Ernie O’Malley papers, one of the largest collections of historical documents of the Irish Civil War period, for the then Archives Department of University College Dublin. Following her work on the O’Malley papers, she edited his best-selling book on the Civil War, The Singing Flame.