Kathleen Lonsdale, 28 January 1903 - 1 April 1971

Abstract

Kathleen Yardley was born in Newbridge, Southern Ireland, on 28 January 1903. She once wrote: ‘Perhaps, for my sake, it was as well that there was no testimony against a high birth rate in those days.’ She was the youngest of ten children, four girls and six boys. Her family was poor, at times wretchedly so. Four of her brothers died in infancy. Her father, Harry Frederick Yardley, had left his own family at the age of ten, becoming first a telegraph boy and then a postman. He married in 1889 (aged thirty-one) and is described on the marriage certificate as ‘Lobby Office Post office, batchelor, son of Daniel Yardley, deed., tailor’. He joined the army through the City of London Volunteers and fought in the South African war, finally becoming regimental sergeant major. There is a family tradition that he received special commendation on discharge for improvements he had introduced in firing techniques. Kathleen was born when he returned from the wars to Ireland to be postmaster in charge of a staff of six at Newbridge post office; this was near to the Curragh camp and dealt with the mail for the Black and Tans. He was an intelligent man, read widely from books he had picked up from junk stalls on almost any subject, the antiquities of Peru, the birds of Western Australia, encyclopaedias, anything that took his fancy. In later years he lived apart from his family (for a time in charge of the post office at Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire), he visited them only occasionally, then very often quarrelling with them. He drank at times and kept his wife chronically short of money: all the children were persuaded by their mother at an early age to ‘sign the pledge’. It now seems possible that his irritability was due to diabetes which he contracted before it could be treated by insulin. He retired early, owing to ill health, when Kathleen was twelve, and died of Bright’s disease when she was twenty. Kathleen wrote: ‘I think he was fond of us and did not know how to show it. I wish that I could have been fonder of him. I think that it was from him that I inherited my passion for facts.’