Francis Martin Rouse Walshe, 1885-1973

Abstract

Francis Martin Rouse Walshe was born in London on 19 September 1885, the elder of the two surviving children of Rose and Michael Charles Walshe, whose firstborn had died in infancy. Rose Walshe was from Devonshire, one of a family of eight; their father, Samuel Light, was a yeoman farmer from the neighbourhood of Brixham. They claimed kinship with the Reverend H. F. Lyte (1793-1847) who wrote ‘Abide with me’ and ‘Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven’. Michael Charles Walshe was from County Mayo in Ireland, the son of a small farmer. He settled in London, founded what was possibly the first nursing agency of the kind now so widely used, became a J.P. and died in 1933 at the age of 80. Of his paternal ancestors F. M. R. Walshe noted in his Personal Record: ‘The Walshes of Mayo (Barony of Tyrawley) derive from the Welsh followers of the Earl of Pembroke (Strongbow) who led the Norman invasion of Ireland in the reign of Henry II. They, with others of the same derivation (Barretts, etc.: see Sir Samuel Ferguson’s ‘The Welshmen of Tyrawley’ in his Lays of the Western Gael ) have remained in Mayo since that time. References to these families are to be found in the Annals of the Four Masters . Tribal warfare appears to have occupied much of their time. None of these has been famous in science, but one of my ancestors was hanged for his part in the Irish rebellion of 1798 and his name is commemorated on a monument in the town of Ballina, Co. Mayo. A comparable, if less marked, turbulence has characterized the strain since that time.’