Born: 5 September 1946, Ireland
Died: 23 November 2017
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Bridget White Lennon
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Niav Gallagher. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
White Lennon, Bridget (‘Biddy’) (1946–2017), actress and food writer, was born in Dublin on 5 September 1946, the only daughter and youngest of two children (her brother Frank was older by one year) to Thomas (Tommy) Lennon, publican, and Ursula White Lennon, a drama teacher. From a young age White Lennon was steeped in Dublin’s theatrical history: her father ran the Abbey Theatre bar next door to the eponymous theatre, where she encountered writers and poets, and actors such as Jimmy O’Dea, while Patrick Kavanagh had been her father’s neighbour in Co. Monaghan (the Lennon family are mentioned in Kavanagh’s poem, ‘My father played the melodeon’). Her mother was a voice production and drama teacher at the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM) and director of the school of acting in the Pocket Theatre at Ely Place, Dublin. Before it closed in 1964, the Pocket Theatre was the location for Deirdre O’Connell’s Stanislavski studio – the first of its kind in Ireland. The studio’s first production, ‘For madmen only’, an adaptation by Saul Colin of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, was staged in the theatre on 7 October 1963. Frank Lennon was in the cast and White Lennon was in attendance; she was quietly convinced that ‘method’ acting was not for her.
White Lennon grew up between three houses during the school year – the family split their time between her father’s place in Lower Abbey Street, her mother’s in Upper Ely Place and her grandparents’ house in Merrion Square – but from June to September they decamped to a converted railway carriage by the seaside in Donabate, next to the golf links, where she and her brother Frank were allowed to go ‘feral’ (Wild food, 8, 9). Both parents worked and visited perhaps twice a month, leaving money for staples such as milk and bread and the children in charge of their grandmother. White Lennon and her brother chose to spend the money on ice cream and ginger beer, foraging along the shore and in hedgerows for wild food – mussels, crabs, clams and berries. One of her earliest memories was of getting up early with her father to gather mushrooms for breakfast on the golf links; he played a few holes of golf while she collected the mushrooms.
White Lennon appeared on stage for the first time at the age of four, in the Old Peacock Theatre’s production of Jack Yeats’s play ‘The sand’ (1949). She began competing in national feiseanna from an early age and won more than thirty cups for acting and elocution. In 1965 she won several major awards, including the Shakespeare trophy and Ballad cup at the Derry feis, and the Father Mathew perpetual cup (speech) at the Father Mathew feis, Dublin (her brother Frank was runner-up). At the age of nine White Lennon insisted on being sent to drama college in England where she enjoyed success – both she and Frank had parts in the television show Hancock’s half hour and the films The belles of St. Trinian’s (1954), starring Alastair Sim, and Violent playground (1958). She continued her formal education in England with the help of tutors. In 1960 she returned to Ireland at her mother’s insistence; it was also at her mother’s insistence that White Lennon studied for a diploma in teaching speech and drama at the RIAM, ensuring she had a career safety net should acting fail.
In 1964 White Lennon auditioned for what became the defining role of her acting career. That year RTÉ commissioned the first rural television soap opera made in Ireland. First aired on 4 January 1965, The Riordans ran until 28 May 1979 on RTÉ One, before transferring to radio for another six years. The script was initially written by James Douglas, but in 1966 Wesley Burrowes became chief scriptwriter. It was one of RTÉ’s most successful programmes and broke ground in numerous ways, not least in how it was filmed. Instead of using a studio, the series used an outside broadcast unit and filmed in real locations – Dunboyne village, and the parish church and Sweeney’s pub in Kilbride, Co. Meath. Set in the fictional Leestown, Co. Kilkenny, the storylines revolved around a farming family headed by Tom and Mary Riordan, played by John Cowley and Moira Hoey, and their sons Benjy, Michael and Jude. Aged just eighteen, White Lennon played Maggie Nael, a barmaid in Johnny Mac’s pub, whose eight-year on-again, off-again courtship with Benjy Riordan held the country spellbound. When they eventually ‘married’ in Kilbride church it was the most watched wedding in Ireland at the time, and Lahinch, Co. Clare, was overrun with fans when the couple’s honeymoon was being filmed. The Riordans was a double-edged sword for RTÉ – its viewership numbers were consistently high and, for many, Sunday night was synonymous with the events in Leestown. The show also generated controversy through its portrayal of storylines that were considered taboo in 1960s and 1970s Ireland, including divorce, contraception and mixed-religion marriages. White Lennon was central to some of the more controversial storylines: when Michael Anthony Doyle’s Fr Sheehy advised her character to take the contraceptive pill because another pregnancy would put her life at risk, RTÉ’s switchboard was inundated with people accusing the series of subverting catholic teachings; when her husband Benjy left to become a missionary, Maggie embarked on an affair with Pat Barry, played by (then-unknown) Gabriel Byrne. White Lennon delighted in knowing she was ‘read off every altar in Ireland’ (Irish Times, 2 Sept. 2017). For the audience, the lines between reality and television often blurred: one viewer wrote to the RTÉ Guide wishing Benjy well in his missionary work, while another berated White Lennon in public for ‘cheating’ on Benjy.
The programme underwent a series of changes in the 1970s – it switched from black and white to colour in 1975, episodes were extended from a half-hour to a full hour, and the theme tune was changed. In 1979 RTÉ’s head of drama, Louis Lentin, and controller of programmes, Muiris Mac Conghail, took the decision to cancel the series on the basis that it was expensive to produce and had run its course. The last episode aired on RTÉ television on 28 May 1979. In the face of public outcry, it was brought back in July as a fifteen-minute radio show, following the six o’clock news on Radio One. Speaking in the dáil the following year, then-Fine Gael TD Tom Enright observed that the show’s cancellation was a mistake: ‘[The Riordans] touched on many important social aspects of not just rural Irish life but all aspects of Irish life. It incorporated many delicate matters and matters which people shied away from and it was an in-depth study of life in Ireland’ (Dáil debates, 18 Nov. 1980). With the move to radio, White Lennon took over some of the scriptwriting, alongside writers Paddy Gilligan and Denis Latimer, whom she had married in August 1970. White Lennon and Latimer also scripted episodes of Glenroe together, the former doing most of the research and the latter the writing. In November 1985 The Riordans was permanently cancelled and the final episode aired on Christmas Eve 1985. Incensed by the decision, White Lennon rang the RTÉ newsroom and delivered her criticisms on air, pointing out that the reason given – that there was no longer public interest in a series about rural life – was undermined by the success of Glenroe.
Though best remembered for The Riordans, White Lennon took on numerous other television and theatre roles throughout her career: she played the parts of Cissy Caffrey in Joseph Strick’s 1967 adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses starring Milo O’Shea as Leopold Bloom, and of Kitty Verdun in RTÉ’s 1967 adaptation of Charley’s aunt, and appeared in The sinners (1970), RTÉ One’s series of short, made-for-television plays. She also continued her association with the stage, appearing in productions such as Peg o’ my heart, The country boys and Night must fall, as well as adjudicating at national amateur drama festivals, including many of the feiseanna where she had previously competed.
White Lennon was interested in food from an early age, whether foraging with her brother on the strand in Donabate, or picking hazelnuts, sweet chestnuts, elderberries and wild strawberries in Merrion Square when staying with her grandparents. Following her father’s death in 1958, she took over the weekly food shopping and learned to cook despite her young age, ‘because it was do that or starve’ (Irish Independent, 22 July 2007). Her interest in food and cooking was piqued further during her years on stage – there were few late-night restaurants in Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s, so cast members would take it in turns to cook for each other, a tradition that became quite competitive. There were lean periods between acting gigs when she worked in restaurants honing her cookery skills, while she and Latimer undertook a cordon bleu cookery course together. Part of Maggie Riordan’s character development was an interest in food, and in the early 1980s White Lennon began writing a food column for Irish Farmers’ Monthly, partly as herself and partly as Maggie.
When The Riordans shifted to radio, White Lennon’s focus moved from stage and television acting to journalism and broadcasting, and from the mid-1980s she stopped acting completely, although she continued to adjudicate drama feiseanna. As well as scriptwriting for The Riordans and Glenroe, she featured regularly on Liam Ó Murchú’s radio show Slán abhaile, where she gave healthy eating tips, usually followed up by a recipe. She also travelled the country delivering cooking demonstrations on behalf of Waterford Stanley (manufacturers of range cookers) and wrote healthy eating columns for local newspapers. In 1989 she published her first cookbook, The leaving home cookbook – a series of recipes put together for her son Dairsie who was leaving home to study in the UK. The same year she also became a founding member of the Guild of Irish Food Writers, which was launched by the minister for food, Joe Walsh, in September. The guild was made up of eleven professional cookery writers, including White Lennon, Myrtle Allen, Theodora Fitzgibbon and Georgina Campbell. By 1997 White Lennon was as well known for her involvement in food as she was for her role as Maggie Riordan – she was writing a bi-monthly column for the Irish Farmers’ Journal and produced several more cookbooks, including her Eating at home cookbook (1990), The Poolbeg book of traditional Irish cooking (1990), Best of Irish traditional cooking (2002), Best of Irish home baking (2003) and The Irish kitchen (2011). In total, she published nineteen cookbooks and books on Irish food, its history and the development of contemporary Irish food culture. Her final publication, Wild food (2013), was written in conjunction with chef Evan Doyle of the BrookLodge hotel and Macreddin Village. The book reflected their joint commitment to foraging and preserving natural food, as well as White Lennon’s involvement in the slow food movement (she was leader of the Slow Food Sugarloaf convivium, and one of the organisers of the inaugural Wild and Slow Winter Fest in 2011). The relationship with Doyle began when White Lennon and her husband lived in Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow. In spring the grounds of their house were carpeted in wild garlic and White Lennon was happy for Doyle and his team to harvest the crop for use in their restaurant at BrookLodge. When she and husband Denis sold their house to move to Camolin, Co. Wexford, one condition of the sale was that Doyle would continue to enjoy one day of the year picking wild garlic in exchange for a hamper from BrookLodge. In 2013 White Lennon returned to Irish television screens as one of the judges on TV3’s Great Irish bake off, featuring in the first two series before illness prevented her from appearing in the final series. In recognition of her contribution to the development of Irish food and food heritage, she was inducted into the hall of fame at the 2015 Food & Wine magazine’s restaurant of the year awards.
In the last years of her life, White Lennon campaigned for several causes, including a ‘yes’ vote in the 2015 marriage equality referendum. Teaming up with journalist Charlie Bird, she went on the road with the ‘I’m voting yes, ask me why’ initiative. Diagnosed with breast cancer, and later lung cancer, White Lennon endured lengthy hospital stays which, she said, were made significantly worse by the quality of the food served to patients. These experiences prompted her efforts to improve the quality of food served in Irish hospitals, including an appearance at the 2016 Bloom festival to highlight the issue.
Biddy White Lennon died on 23 November 2017 in Leeson Park nursing home following a lengthy illness and was cremated following a private ceremony at Mount Jerome cemetery, Dublin. Her husband, Denis, predeceased her in December 2016. In a career spanning several decades, White Lennon remained true to her passions and, as an actor, scriptwriter, journalist and Irish food advocate, never shied away from controversy.