Helen Maybury Roe
Contributed by Aideen Ireland, FSA
Helen Maybury Roe was born in December 1895, an only child. Her father, despite his surname, did not enter into the family profession of brewing and milling but, instead, became a corn merchant.
Miss Roe has many distinctions to her name. After taking her degree in Trinity College Dublin and completing a period as a teacher, she was appointed one of the very first members of staff of the Carnegie Libraries, serving in Coleraine, Co. Derry and Thurles, Co. Tipperary before becoming, in 1929, the very first County Librarian for Co. Laois (her home county).
Early retirement in 1939 facilitated her move to Dublin where she now had the leisure and means to pursue her great interest in life – research and publication devoted to the early Christian and medieval periods.
She joined the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1936, was elected Fellow in 1964, and became an Honorary Life Fellow in 1975.
Her first publication for the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland was in 1937 (relating, not unnaturally to Co. Laois) – but she soon moved away from the prehistoric period to devote her life to crosses, fonts, carved stones, funeral monuments, and matters of iconography and interpretation of symbols.
She was elected President, the first female, of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1965. She was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1984.
Her research as well as her interest in local antiquities, while she was still based in Co. Laois, has resulted in a considerable archive of her personal papers, research notes and photographs. County Laois Local Authority Archives holds 115 lantern slides belonging to her and well as her personal papers, which is an extensive collection of her own notes on the antiquaries of County Laois covering the years 1923-1932. The Laois County Archivist recently secured funding to publish some of Miss Roe's work on Placenames in the County.
Her further personal papers are now with the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland while further material relating to her has recently been donated to the Society by a Kilkenny friend.
The publication Figures from the Past: studies in figurative art in Christian Ireland in memory of Helen Roe was edited by Professor Etienne Rynne for the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland and Glendale Press in 1987. The volume was launched in the Royal Irish Academy in October 1987. This volume was the ultimate, and final, tribute from the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland to its first female President.
Miss Roe began to publish in 1928 when she contributed an article to Irish Travel. Her last publication was in the Old Kilkenny Review in 1983. In between she published a total of 74 articles (according to the compilation by Richard Haworth in Figures from the past).
Between 1954 and 1956 Miss Roe published on high crosses in the archdiocese of Armagh. In 1958 came the High Crosses of Western Ossory (when went to five print-runs) while in 1959 came the High Crosses of Kells (which went to four print-runs). In the 1960s Miss Roe provided serious studies of the high crosses of Clogher, Ahenny. Muirideach’s cross at Monasterboice while between the late 1960s and early 1970s she entered the medieval period with publications on the cult of St Michael and on the Holy Trinity. By the 1980s she was busy publishing on the Instruments of the Passion. Her death in May 1988 came as a shock to all. Had she lived longer there is no guessing where her sphere of interest might have taken her.