A formidable Tipperary woman with a thirst for knowledge

Everyone in Clonmel knows Peg Rossiter, her presence and reputation precede her.
So, when I was told that I was matched up with her to interview, I must admit I was nervous. I had heard of a formidable woman; one who is still penning a column in The Nationalist, well-respected, a powerhouse in her own right, from a long-standing family in Clonmel, a writer herself, and she was due to be turning 100 years old.
Walking up to her house, a house that had seen her raise all three of her now adult children, I noticed a beautiful and crude clay carving by the front door that read ‘Rossiter, John + Peg’. Peg had had her 100th birthday by this point, and I could not help but wonder about the power of a woman who must have seen so much. On her front mat was an envelope addressed to The Nationalist, a long-standing agreement between herself and the newspaper to leave the finished copy of her weekly column there for them to collect.

BRIGHT SMILE
Peg herself, was sitting in her living room with her husband John. Even in her casual clothes, she looked so well put together. She held the room. She welcomed me in with a bright smile and even brighter eyes.
Then her husband, John, headed off to let us get into it, with Peg saying, “I’ll see you later darling.”
“In other words, get lost,” John laughed as he exited. I noticed a couple of wooden canes propped up, but both Peg and John appeared quite steady on their feet.
As we began, I could see Peg’s keen writer’s mind already posing questions behind her eyes, a habit she had had most of her life. She got into writing at seventeen years old, “as my mother would say, I was a ‘know-all’. I was always expressing my opinion and telling everybody what to do,” she laughed. “And I felt I had to tell the world what to do,” she explained, laughing even harder.
The love of her town radiated around this woman.
“I grew up in the Heywood Road, where my people came from Ulster in 1842. James Barrett, my great-great-great-grandfather was a cabinetmaker, he made furniture, and there was a very good furniture-maker in Clonmel, so he came from County Tyrone in the 1840s to work for them.”
Her family set up great roots in Clonmel.
“So, about 1860, he obviously did very well because he was able to buy about an acre and a half of land on the Heywood Road, with six cottages on it. That’s where I was born, and then he built a bigger house for us, which had a large garden. My father grew just about everything that we ate in vegetables and fruit, and my mother kept hens, and we had eggs and chickens, and fruit and all the rest of it. In many ways, we were far better off materially than our neighbours, but my mother was extremely generous with our eggs and vegetables, which were distributed among the neighbours.”

VALUE OF KINDNESS
Her mother taught her the value of kindness to others, and it is an ethos that she has carried with her throughout her life.
“When you consider the terrible things that are happening in the world, the personal kindness of people is wonderful. Especially in Ireland.”
Her husband John had recently been ill, and their neighbours have rallied around them, making sure their laundry and other essentials were done, so that they didn’t need to think about it whilst he recuperated.
“And it was spontaneously done which was wonderful. That’s the sort of society I grew up in,” said Peg.

NEIGHBOURS
Many of Peg’s neighbours growing up were widows of the First World War and The Great Flu of 1919, and at a time where pensions for widows was inconceivable, Peg was greatly inspired by these women who became their household’s breadwinners.
“These women had to support their families, and one of my earliest memories was being in bed and hearing Mrs Smith, who was a widow living opposite us on the road, and she would wake me every morning at 6am as she closed the front door, and with her steps on the road as she went down the street. And she would go and light the furnaces in the schools for central heating, at that time they weren’t connected to electricity, so she would go around the three or four schools and light them. And I would hear her coming back about 8am, when I then knew it was time to get up, and she would then get her children up and dressed and off to school. And they would come home from school, say 3.30pm in the afternoon, and about 4pm she went off again to clean the schools. This was how she earned her living. It’s the sort of world that you would hardly understand today. They were wonderfully brave women. And they didn’t complain, and they were always ready, as we would say in Clonmel ‘to do a good turn’.”
Peg spoke admiringly about the “brave” and fascinating women that had influenced her in life and, as I sat and listened to her speak, that spark and tenacity that they collectively instilled in her was still very evident to see.
Having grown up during a time where traditional gender roles were the norm, “I began to rebel against this very early on,” Peg proudly told me. “I’m still rebelling,” she says.
Though many might know of Peg through her columns in The Nationalist, which came about forty years ago when her close friend, the Editor at the time, Brendan Long asked her, “if I gave you a column, could you fill it every week?”

HUMANITY
She was also court stenographer for just over twenty years, a role that she took on at the age of fifty.
“I was exposed to a wide variety of experiences of humanity at its best, its worst, at its most foolish, and its most pathetic. All over the range,” said Peg.
Her thirst for knowledge started during her childhood too, although she modestly acknowledges her shortcomings, “There are also things with which I am absolutely stupid about, and I have no desire to improve upon,” admitted Peg.
It evidently did not slow down either, as when Peg was in her sixties and her children all established themselves, she signed up to evening classes in the local vocational college, gaining university certificates in Sociology, Economics, Women’s Studies and History.
“So, I have lots of bits of paper,” she told me. “I started Psychology, but I bailed out of that,” but Peg really enjoyed the courses, which were all three-year commitments each, as well as the people she met at them.
What also struck me well, was her intense curiosity about the world around her. She has travelled extensively, solo in her youth, and in later years with John and her children. So, it came as no surprise to learn that her children, and subsequently grandchildren (plus one great-granddaughter) were all living outside of Ireland.
“My son John is a Neurosurgeon and Neuropathologist in Canada. Jane, who won a scholarship in Journalism, went to the United States, met a man, and wouldn’t come back,” something that Peg found very funny, “and she has a job there now doing something with computers, I haven’t a clue what it is. And Elizabeth is a teacher in Germany.”
Proud of her children, Peg is quite modest about her and John’s roles in shaping them into smart, well-rounded and adventurous people.
“My husband John went to Japan to see Elizabeth who was teaching there, and he also went to China. The others were at school at the time, so I couldn’t go.”

GLENARY
Peg’s interests still lie very close to home and within Clonmel, and she recounted a very funny story of how she discovered Glenary at the age of ten, by convincing her then eight-year-old sister to skip 10.30am Mass and go and explore up the mountain instead.
“From our garden at home, I could see these hills and I always wondered what was at the back of them,” she says. Having made their way up the hill, Peg spotted smoke in the valley below and suggested going down, and that was how they found Glenary, which is a little village in the Comeragh foothills about two kilometres from Clonmel.
“And this man met us in the boreen, which is Irish for ‘little road’, his name was Tom and he said, ‘Little girls, what are you doing here?’ So, I told him where we were from, and he said, ‘Come into my sister.’ So, we went in, and he gave us curnie homemade cake and milk, which was delicious, and then he brought us down and he showed us another way to come back. So, then we came back here on the top of Cannon Hill, and then found a track down home. Now we had left home at 10am in the morning, and we were arriving back at near 6pm to my distraught parents who’d gone to every neighbour, every cousin, every friend and were ready to go to the guards when we arrived, and I got the father and mother of a telling off, for as my mother would say ‘leading my sister astray’.”

ADVOCATE
Peg has looked extensively into Glenary over the years (“at one stage near one hundred people lived there, they were refugees in the age of landlordism”), and has become an active advocate for Clonmel, explaining to me how Clonmel was what was called a ‘Quaker City’.
“The Quakers came here, largely as refugees, and they were opportunists in the best possible way. They saw a vacancy here in the grain trade and they bought farms, they grew grain and then they built mills to process the grain and to export it down the river in flat-bottom boats to Carrick-on-Suir, and down to Waterford and off to England. They were ahead of their time.”

CAMPAIGNER
Peg was a founding member of An Òige in Clonmel, which introduced young people to hillwalking and mountain-climbing. Her deep historical and environmental interests also led to her becoming Secretary and President of the Clonmel Historical and Archaeological Society.
She joined An Taisce and was instrumental in stopping the demolishing of Richmond Mill, campaigning to preserve, map and renew all of the medieval walls in the town, as well as starting the idea for what we now know as The Blueway, although she finds that name twee as it is just “the bloody path to Carrick!”
Peg Rossiter, a woman who has achieved so much within her 100 years, has gained another admirer in me.
Her parting words were, “If you’re dogged enough, and you live long enough, you’ll eventually get things done. And they’ve got to say nasty things about you, but then you know you’re on the right track.”

Writer Channelle has started her own novel.

Chanelle has a degree in Fashion Journalism, with previous articles and online articles having been published in the industry. With over ten years’ writing experience, Chanelle has edited and run blogs, online magazines, and is currently writing a novel and starting up another online magazine.