Born: 10 August 1880, India
Died: 18 December 1958.
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Florence ffrench-Mullen
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Nicholas Allen. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Salkeld, Blanaid (1880–1958), poet and actor, was born Florence ffrench-Mullen on 10 August 1880 in India, daughter of Lt Colonel Jarlath ffrench-Mullen and Anna Maria (Mina) Byrne. Her father was in the Bengal medical service and brother to St Laurence ffrench-Mullen (father of Madeleine ffrench-Mullen), after his retirement and return to Ireland he was active in the Gaelic League.
Blanaid spent her childhood in Dublin but met the Englishman Henry L. Salkeld, a member of the Indian civil service, in Bombay and married him there in 1902. He died in 1909 and she returned to Dublin in 1910, living the rest of her life on his British state pension. She started to act under the stage name ‘Nell Byrne’ and played in the Metropolitan Players’ version of Ibsen’s ‘Little Eyolf’ in 1912. A member of the Abbey Theatre’s second company, she played Stella in G. Sidney Paternoster’s dramatisation of Jonathan Swift’s life, ‘The dean of St Patrick’s’, staged at the Abbey on 24 January 1913. She was an Irish-language activist and played Mrs Finnessy in ‘Mac na mná déirce’, by Pádraic Ó Conaire, for the Na Clucheoin company at the Abbey (2 May 1913). A nationalist, she was involved in the Irish Theatre at Hardwicke Street, founded by Thomas MacDonagh, Edward Martyn, and Joseph Plunkett in 1914. She acted frequently for them, notably in Chekov’s ‘Uncle Vanya’ (28 June 1915), but Joseph Holloway criticised her sometimes wooden performances, especially in the role of Fru Heyst in Strindberg’s ‘Easter’, 3 March 1916.
There is some evidence that she was involved in Cumann na mBan but it is unclear how actively. She was in Howth during the Easter rising; her mother, fearing a police raid, burned her correspondence with MacDonagh. Taking rooms at 130 St Stephen’s Green after the rebellion, she lived latterly at 43 Morehampton Road. She played in the chorus of Euripides’ ‘The Trojan women’ for the Dublin Drama League at the Abbey (7 March 1920) but became more interested in the writing and translation of poetry, especially from the Russian of Anna Akhmatova. Publishing regularly in the Dublin Magazine, Irish Writing, and The Bell from the 1920s to the 1950s, she also wrote numerous prose pieces and reviews. She issued five volumes of her own poetry, most notably Hello eternity! (1933) and The engine is left running (1937), both experimental works with an independent female vision. Her play ‘Scarecrow over the corn’ (1941) was produced at the Gate Theatre from 18 to 20 December 1941. Living on her pension, she continued to write until her death in Dublin on 18 December 1958.