Death of Mollie Gillen
Steve Hayes
Her painstaking research for her books helped us a great deal with out family
history, as described here:
http://hayesgreene.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/death-of-canadian-author-mollie-gillen/
MOLLIE GILLEN, 100: WRITER
Specialist in Imperial history wrote early study of L.M.
Montgomery
Australian-born author and indefatigable researcher
published the first serious biography of the famed PEI
novelist. She later found inspiration in her convict, Botany
Bay, ancestors
SANDRA MARTIN
Globe and Mail
January 31, 2009
For those of us who aren't fussed about academic
credentials, Mollie Gillen ranks as a specialist in Imperial
history. Indeed, contemplating her energy, erudition and the
range of her interests, the ditty about Queen Victoria, in
all her regalia, with one foot in Canada and the other in
Australia, comes to mind.
Born and educated in Australia, married to a Canadian
sergeant in wartime England, Mrs. Gillen lived and worked
here for most of her very long life. No more than 5-foot-2,
with bespectacled hazel eyes and curly brown hair - which
eventually turned into a snowy crown - she was the author of
several acclaimed biographies, including an early study of
Lucy Maud Montgomery.
"I had enormous respect for her as a writer," said Mary
Rubio, author of The Gift of Wings, the authorized biography
of Montgomery that was published in 2008. "Her biography
[The Wheel of Things] was the first good one to take L. M.
Montgomery seriously and to go into primary sources. She was
a journalist, but she was an incredible scholar. She was a
phenomenal researcher, very shrewd at sizing up people and
with a wonderful knowledge of history."
Although Mrs. Gillen was never awarded the Order of Canada,
she was duly lauded by her native Australia. In 1995, she
was inducted into the Order of Australia and awarded an
honorary doctorate from the University of Sydney for "the
important contributions she has made in recent years to
Australian history," including The Search for John Small,
"which set new standards for the writing of family history,"
and The Founders of Australia, "which analyzed the
background to the First Fleet and contained meticulously
researched pen-pictures."
Describing Mrs. Gillen as a "very positive, optimistic
person," her daughter, Barbara Gillen, a retired writer for
industrial trade magazines, suggested that it was her
mother's attitude that made her such a determined and
successful researcher. "She just knew that if she looked
long enough she would find what she was searching for ... if
she found one avenue of research was closed off, she simply
went down another route to reach her goal."
There were two great tragedies in Mrs. Gillen's life: the
death of her partner Phil Murphy from an asthma attack in
Sydney in 1983 and the death of her only son, Ian, in a
motor-vehicle accident near Alice Springs in 1996, when she
was 88. Both deaths were sudden and might have been
prevented.
"There was never a problem that she didn't think she could
overcome, except for the deaths of Phil and Ian. She
couldn't control that," her daughter said. "It was really
only in the years after Ian was killed that she suffered
periods of depression and loss of confidence in her
abilities."
Kathleen Mollie Woolnough was born in Sydney, New South
Wales in Australia, the eldest of four children of Robert
Edmund and Bertha Grace (née Youdale) Woolnough. The Spanish
flu, the deadly epidemic that circled much of the globe and
killed at least 20 million people, arrived in Australia in
1919; Mollie's mother and a newborn brother died in June,
and her father succumbed in October. All that Mollie could
remember of her father's death was going to school one
morning from her own home in the suburb of Belmore and never
returning.
The three orphans were taken in first by their maternal
grandparents and then raised by an aunt, Edith Youdale, in
the Ashfield area of Sydney. Mollie began composing stories
as a child and won a prize as a young teenager for a tale
about a ghost who haunted a castle, until his chains, which
were in "rattling good order," vanished. The story ended
happily when a "sweet" ghost "with long draperies and
beautiful curly teeth, and one silky hair" returned his
chains and they fell in love.
After attending Normanhurst, a private girl's school, Mollie
went to the University of Sydney, graduating with a bachelor
of arts degree in 1930. She worked as a junior copywriter
for the Metropolitan Business College and as a governess in
a rural part of New South Wales before sailing to London in
the middle 1930s. There, after meeting and agreeing to marry
an Australian, she returned home - although not until after
she had watched the procession for King George V's Silver
Jubilee in 1935. The romance fizzled and she set off again
for London, arriving back in 1937.
Two years later, she met Orval Gillen, a sergeant in the
Royal Canadian Air Force who had arrived in London in one of
the first contingents of Canadian troops sent overseas after
the Second World War was declared. They were married on June
25, 1940, the very day that France capitulated to Germany.
Anticipating the end of Sgt. Gillen's two-year tour of duty,
Canadian officials shipped Mrs. Gillen and some other war
brides back to Canada in 1941.
She sailed out of Glasgow on Feb. 19, 1941, almost certainly
on the SS Nerissa, a converted passenger vessel that was so
speedy she sailed without the escort of a convoy. Dubbed the
"lucky" Nerissa, she evaded enemy submarines on 39
crossings, but fewer than eight weeks after Mrs. Gillen
disembarked in Halifax on March 2, the Nerissa's luck ran
out. She was torpedoed 200 nautical miles off Londonderry,
Ireland, with the loss of 140 souls, the only transport
carrying Canadian troops that was sunk during the Second
World War.
Her husband arrived in Canada in August, 1941, and was
posted to the air force base in Trenton, Ont., and then to
Montreal where the Gillens' son was born in 1942. Their
daughter came four years later. By 1949, the Gillens were
living in Ottawa and Mrs. Gillen was beginning to publish
articles and romantic fiction in newspapers and magazines.
In the mid-1950s, Mrs. Gillen began working in the
information division of the Department of Public Works, and
became a writer and the editor of the magazine North for the
Department of Northern Affairs in 1958.
She also taught fiction in a weekly class in the extension
department of Carleton University for several years and
became active in the University Women's Club of Ottawa,
eventually serving as its first vice-president. That's where
she met writer and historian Lita-Rose Betcherman, the
author most recently of Court Lady and Country Wife: Royal
Privilege and Civil War: Two Noble Sisters In Seventeenth
Century England. "She had a quiet personality, but anybody
who came in contact with her remained her friend. She didn't
forget them and they didn't forget her," said Ms.
Betcherman, adding, "I never knew her when she wasn't
working on a book."
In 1960, Mrs. Gillen published her first novel, Star of
Death, a thriller set in Britain and Australia. By then, her
marriage had faltered. The Gillens had very different
interests, according to Mrs. Gillen's daughter, who
described her mother as intellectually ambitious and her
father as more prosaic. They never divorced. Warrant Officer
F1 Gillen eventually retired from the air force after 30
years service and died, aged 89, on May 8, 1995.
Mrs. Gillen had met copywriter Phil Murphy, the "love of her
life," when he was on secondment at the Department of Public
Works from McLaren Advertising in Toronto. In the summer of
1961, Mrs. Gillen and her nearly grown children moved to
Toronto so she could be closer to Mr. Murphy. She soon began
working as associate editor and staff writer for Doris
Anderson (obituary: March 3, 2007) the editor of Chatelaine.
She spent about a dozen years at the magazine researching
and writing scores of articles, including some, such as an
award-winning three-part series on the Massey family, which
whetted her appetite to write book-length manuscripts.
She published The Masseys: Founding Family in 1965; The
Prince and His Lady, an intrepidly researched study of Queen
Victoria's father, Edward Duke of Kent, and his mistress,
Madame de St. Laurent, in 1970; and in 1972, The
Assassination of the Prime Minister, a biography of Spencer
Perceval, who was shot through the heart in the lobby of the
British House of Commons during the Luddite riots of 1812.
Journalist and writer Michele Landsberg, who began working
part-time at Chatelaine in the latter half of 1970,
remembers Mrs. Gillen as "a very precise and diligent
researcher who was very much respected by all of us because
of her insistence on integrity in writing - checking the
facts and not being sloppy about inferences." She was "a
delightfully quixotic character with a passion for British
aristocracy," an obsession that bemused the younger staff.
"She was always researching some member of the British Royal
Family and delighted in her discoveries and in sharing them
with us lavishly when we wandered into her office," said Ms.
Landsberg, who became staff writer - the magazine could only
afford one - after Mrs. Gillen retired in 1973 at the age of
65, which was then mandatory retirement age.
One of Mrs. Gillen's final assignments on the magazine was a
long piece on Lucy Maud Montgomery, which appeared in July,
1973, a few months shy of the centenary of the author's
birth on Prince Edward Island, but nicely timed to coincide
with a royal tour to the garden isle by the Queen. As had
happened before, Mrs. Gillen's curiosity and prodigious
research expanded beyond the confines of a magazine article.
After leaving Chatelaine, Mrs. Gillen moved to London, where
she and Mr. Murphy, who was working on Campaign, a trade
magazine for the advertising industry, lived in Dolphin
Square near the Thames in Pimlico and she worked full tilt
on the book that would become The Wheel of Things: A
Biography of L.M. Montgomery. Published in 1975, it was the
first and only serious biography of one of Canada's best
known writers until Mary Rubio published her long-awaited
biography last fall.
Mrs. Gillen found a trove of more than 40 unknown letters
that Montgomery had exchanged over the course of her life
with George Boyd MacMillan a Scottish newspaperman. The
letters, which filled "an intellectual vacuum" in
Montgomery's life, according to Prof. Rubio, would have been
destroyed had Mrs. Gillen not uncovered them and then
arranged to have them preserved in The National Archives of
Canada. "This was a very, very important find for Canada."
From a Canadian literary biography, Mrs. Gillen turned to
family history - her own - and spent much of the next decade
working in the British Library and other repositories
writing a book about her ancestor John Small. A British
marine, Mr. Small was discharged in the troop cutbacks of
the 1780s and, without recourse to social services, he, and
three colleagues, turned to highway robbery. At trial, one
of the thieves was acquitted, one was sentenced to hang, and
two, including Mr. Small, were given seven years
transportation beyond the seas. Eleven ships, called The
First Fleet, sailed from England on May 13, 1787, bound for
Australia to establish the first British colony in New South
Wales. They arrived at Botany Bay on Jan. 26, 1788, the date
that is now celebrated as Australia Day. On board, Mr. Small
met another prisoner, Mary Parker, whom he later married.
The Search for John Small was published in 1985.
By then Mrs. Gillen had taken some of that research and
incorporated it into a much more ambitious historical
project, a biographical dictionary of the First Fleeters,
the approximately 1,500 convicts, sailors and other
travellers who became the first European settlers in
Australia. In 1983, she won a grant from the British Academy
and used some of the money for a trip to Australia with Mr.
Murphy, hoping to spend six weeks in the collections of the
Mitchell Library (the state library of New South Wales).
After the plane landed, quarantine officials boarded and
sprayed the cabin with an insecticide before allowing
passengers to debark. Mr. Murphy, who had seriously
compromised lungs because of advanced emphysema, suffered a
massive asthma attack and died that evening in hospital in
Sydney.
A devastated Mrs. Gillen returned to England six weeks later
with "chaotic" notes and Mr. Murphy's ashes. After packing
up his belongings, she found life intolerably lonely in the
apartment they had shared and returned to Toronto. In 1985,
she made another visit to Australia for the celebration of
the 197th anniversary of the marriage of her ancestors John
Small and Mary Parker and to do yet more research on what
would become The Founders of Australia.
In an interview in The Sydney Morning Herald on her final
visit to Australia, at 86, to be invested in the Order of
Australia and to receive her honorary doctorate in 1995, she
described how she recorded her research on hundreds of lined
cards and filed them in cut-down cereal boxes. "I'd like to
do my 10th book before I pass on," she confided, while
refusing to divulge the topic of her latest project. It was
a history of the Royal Navy in the late 18th century,
through the focus of one of the sailors on HMS Bounty, the
ship under the command of Captain William Bligh - the man
who survived the mutiny of his ship's company and then
became Governor of New South Wales.
Completing that book would have been a fitting peak to a
long and diligent life, but tragedy intervened. In February,
1996, her son Ian, aged 53, was killed, in a motor accident
in Alice Springs, N.T., while on holiday with a friend. Mrs.
Gillen never really recovered from this second tragic and
sudden death. The investigation into how the accident
occurred and who was driving, which took almost a year, was
inconclusive, leaving Mrs. Gillen enervated and frustrated.
By then, almost 90, she moved back across the Atlantic from
London (where she had resettled in 1988, in Dolphin Square,
the London complex where she had lived with her first
husband nearly 50 years earlier) and moved into her son's
apartment in Toronto. Suffering from macular degeneration,
glaucoma, and cataracts, she was legally blind, but
determined to carry on. She made yearly trips to Britain to
do research in the British Library and to visit friends and
family until the millennium celebrations.
Two years later, the beginnings of dementia and her
increasing physical frailty meant she had to give up
independent living and move into the Chester Village nursing
home in Toronto. That's where friends of varying ages,
including her faithful visitor Sarah Mayor, helped Mrs.
Gillen celebrate her 100th birthday last November.
MOLLIE GILLEN
Mollie Gillen was born in Sydney, Australia on Nov. 1, 1908.
She died in Toronto on Jan. 3, 2009. She leaves her
daughter, Barbara, her younger sister, Marjorie Thomas, four
nephews, a stepdaughter and her extended family.
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk
DiMa
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