Born: 30 May 1918, Ireland
Died: 20 January 2017
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Elinor Vere O’Brien
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.
Wiltshire, Elinor Vere (née O’Brien) (1918–2017), photographer and botanist, was born Elinor Vere O’Brien in Dublin on 30 May 1918, the eldest child and only daughter of Hugh Murrough Vere O’Brien, an engineer, and his wife Margaret Ernestine O’Brien (née O’Brien). She had two brothers, Murrough and Turlough. Wiltshire’s family connections were numerous and illustrious: her maternal great-grandfather was the politician William Smith O’Brien, who was descended from the eleventh-century high-king Brian Bórama, and her great-grand-aunts were the Anglican saint Harriet Monsell and the social reformer and writer Charlotte Grace O’Brien. Her maternal grandfather was the lawyer and writer Edward O’Brien. Her mother Margaret was half-sibling to the artist Dermod O’Brien, and full sibling to the sailor and author (Edward) Conor O’Brien, the first Irish person to sail around the world in his own yacht. Wiltshire also had significant family connections through her father: her paternal grandmother was the diarist, philanthropist and craftswoman Florence O’Brien, who revived the Limerick lace industry.
Early life and education
Wiltshire spent the first years of her life on Foynes Island, Co. Limerick, where she was educated at home with her brothers. The island had several large houses along the shore, most with their own piers and boathouses, and the family used a rowboat to reach the nearby town of Foynes. Growing up in a family of artists, explorers and socially minded activists gave Wiltshire an expansive and creative childhood. The explorer and family friend George Mallory was pressed into action on one visit to use his climbing skills to hang a tapestry in the Wiltshire home (he also gave her some chocolate). In September 1929 Wiltshire was sent to board in Newtown school, Waterford. Her brother Murrough also attended Newtown, but their youngest brother Turlough died in February 1933, aged just nine years. Wiltshire continued in the school until December 1936. Artistic from a young age, Wiltshire’s work was praised following an exhibition of student art in June 1935 – the press report noted that she took after her uncle Dermod, then president of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA). The family was also well-travelled – in 1938 Wiltshire and her father holidayed in the Netherlands, while her mother travelled to Vancouver for six months around the same time. The O’Briens appear to have been engaged in both Irish and European politics – unsurprising given their ancestry – and in December 1938 they hosted a young German named Hans Forell, one of a number of Christian refugees of Jewish ancestry who had travelled from Berlin to Hamburg and from there to Cobh. Three years later, Wiltshire was secretary of the Foynes and District Unemployed Association when they met to protest the abolition of the dole in rural areas, ‘particularly in view of the great increase in unemployment and the cost of living during war conditions’ (Limerick Leader, 12 Mar. 1941).
Journalist and printer
It appears that Wiltshire spent time travelling in the early 1940s (her niece Charlotte believed that having spent the first twenty years or so of her life in Foynes, she wanted to experience life off the island). From 1946 she contributed articles to the Irish Press, at first lifestyle pieces of a relatively brief nature, but later longer articles on her travels in Ireland and abroad, the handweavers of Avoca, and a book published by her grandmother, Florence Arnold-Forster. By 1948 she was living in Dublin at 25 Raglan Road where she and the poet Thomas O’Brien (no relation) established a duplicating business and then a printing company. From an early age Tom O’Brien had left-wing sympathies: when he joined the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the aftermath of the 1932 general election, he tended more towards the radical socialist politics than the military aspects and in 1937 he joined the Communist Party of Ireland. He fought with the International Brigades in the Spanish civil war and published numerous poems and articles. In his unfinished memoir, The accidental publisher (2024), O’Brien’s son Michael said his father and Wiltshire shared a similar political outlook – according to him she was involved in a broad range of leftist activities, both cultural and political, and was dedicated to promoting the cause of socialism and challenging the establishment. In 1948 she invested in Thomas O’Brien’s fledgling printing enterprise, based on Parliament Street, Dublin, which they called E. & T. O’Brien; she also worked there for a time. The company imported a small lithography machine from America – one of the first of its kind in Dublin – and used it to print propaganda promoting their socialist views. They also printed legal documents and conducted general trade printing. In addition, E. & T. O’Brien produced Second thoughts: the thinking competitors’ weekly, a national crossword solver written by Thomas.
It was most probably through her work for the Irish Press that Wiltshire met journalist and writer Tony Molloy – he was the theatre critic for the newspaper, but also wrote adventure stories for children, as well as plays, radio scripts, poems and newspaper articles. Molloy was from Tullamore, Co. Offaly, and through his grandfather was related to poet Patrick Kavanagh, with whom he was very friendly. Although Wiltshire’s relationship with Molloy ended when he died of Bright’s disease in 1951, her friendship with Kavanagh persisted, not least because they both lived on Raglan Road – he was known to refer to her as his ‘protestant friend’ (Quinn, 313). In addition to writing for the Irish Press, Wiltshire had developed an interest in photography by this date, and the earliest photographs in the National Library of Ireland’s (NLI) Wiltshire collection are of Kavanagh, taken in Ballinaclash, Co. Wicklow, in 1951. According to Kavanagh’s biographer Antoinette Quinn, ‘for the remainder of his life [she] … was a loyal friend to Kavanagh and he came to rely on her kindness and disinterested concern for his welfare … He confided in her and … she advised him well’ (ibid, 313). When Kavanagh left Ireland for London in 1952 following the collapse of his magazine, Kavanagh’s Weekly, Wiltshire took care of his flat and his post, and she was instrumental in establishing an appeal fund for the poet following his failed libel trial against The Leader. On 1 March 1954 Wiltshire convened the Kavanagh appeal fund committee in the Gresham Hotel. Other committee members included Joseph Hone, John Ryan and Eoin O’Mahony. The committee sent out letters to Kavanagh’s acquaintances, prominent Irish personalities and some overseas writers asking for support, and contributors included John Betjeman, T. S. Eliot and Jack B. Yeats.
Photographing Dublin
Through her friendship with Kavanagh, Wiltshire was also part of the first Bloomsday commemoration on 16 June 1954, when Brian O’Nolan approached Anthony Cronin, Kavanagh, John Ryan and Michael Scott to take a jaunt around Dublin. Wiltshire accompanied them on their journey, in four horse-drawn cabs, from architect Michael Scott’s home in Sandycove to Ringsend, finishing in the Bailey public house on Duke Street; she recorded the events for posterity with her camera. By that date Wiltshire had established herself as a professional photographer and set up a photographic studio, The Green Studio, based at 118 St Stephen’s Green with Reginald (Reggie) Wiltshire, a young photographer and former natural science student from Trinity College Dublin. Though they advertised technical and scientific photography services and concentrated on commercial, architectural and art-related photography, Wiltshire found herself drawn to candid portraits of people and streetscapes – her early photographs of Kavanagh show her developing interest. In April 1954 the studio held its first photographic exhibition, titled ‘People and places’; one review called the images ‘so true to Irish life and so artistically satisfying that they linger in the memory’ (Irish Independent, 22 Apr. 1954). In May and July of that year Wiltshire visited the Travelling community at the Sheridan/O’Brien camp in Loughrea, Co. Galway, and in Cork (the NLI’s Wiltshire collection holds thirty-four of the photographs she took as the families prepared to head to the annual Cahirmee horse fair in Buttevant, Co. Cork, capturing some of the traditions and customs of Traveller life that were even then beginning to fade).
Wiltshire and Reggie married in Dublin in July 1956 and honeymooned in Paris, where they reportedly treated themselves to two expensive folio volumes of photographs by French artist and humanist photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. In a later interview Wiltshire cited Cartier-Bresson’s street photography as her greatest influence: like him she felt a good image was the result of several factors such as form and lighting, but also an emotional connection with the subject. Although the studio concentrated on commercial photography, Wiltshire focused more on the streetscape outside their walls. In 1955 she acquired a Rolleiflex camera – held at waist level, the image to be captured is viewed through a 6x6cm ground-glass screen. This style of camera meant that many of her subjects were unaware their picture was being taken, and this lent the images a natural and uninhibited air. The photographs, mainly of Dublin, were taken over a fifteen-year period and document a changing city, in the same way J. P. Donleavy or Anthony Cronin captured the city’s waning literary life in words. Wiltshire enjoyed exploring the city and recording various features of human and historic interest; some of her subjects were photographed at the suggestion of Kavanagh or Desmond Guinness (Fitzpatrick). There is a poignancy to the images in their candid capture of Dublin’s everyday life – they are a window to a world that, even as she took the picture, she knew was passing: little girls walking in a Corpus Christi procession, adults and children at St Colmcille’s well in Rathfarnham for pattern day celebrations, clothes heaped in piles outside a clothes shop in Winetavern Street, a boy giving a donation to a nun in Moore Street market, a crowd inspecting second-hand clothes and shoes at Cumberland Street market. Wiltshire also captured the physical details of the city: Georgian Dublin, tenement buildings, the shattered remains of Nelson’s column on O’Connell Street. Her photographs of an eviction on York Street in 1964 capture the unsympathetic manner in which tenants were relocated to large developments on the outskirts of the city; in 1969 she photographed children playing in the square in front of the newly built towers in Ballymun. (When Wiltshire’s photographs were deposited in the NLI’s photographic archive, it was visited by members of the Donnelly family, who featured in the eviction photos.)
International photographer and botanist
On 11 May 1968 Reggie died of cancer, aged just thirty-seven. Although the studio remained successful, Wiltshire had lost her motivation to continue in the business and her Dublin series of photos ends in 1969. After one final exhibition The Green Studio was sold, after which Wiltshire spent six weeks in Ethiopia and the resulting exhibition of her photos from this trip was launched by Conor Cruise O’Brien in March 1971. Later in 1971 she moved to London, and from 1974 to 1983 she worked for the Intourist travel agency, arranging specialist tours to the USSR. Wiltshire had always had an interest in travel, especially in Soviet countries – she and Reggie had travelled to Leningrad (St Petersburg), Moscow, Tashkent and Tbilisi together – and her knowledge of Russian, together with her love of travel, made her an ideal tour guide for travel within the USSR.
Encouraged by her botanist niece Sylvia Reynolds, from the late 1980s Wiltshire became increasingly involved in botany, having been interested in plant life as a photographer from the 1960s: at least one trip that she took with Reggie was to take photos of plants in the Burren in their natural habitat. She had also been friends with botanist Mary Scannell since the early 1960s, a friendship that had influenced her niece. Living in Lancaster Gate, London, Wiltshire was an active member of the London Natural History Society. She took part in their survey of the gardens of Buckingham Palace (1995–9) and in an interview in December 1999 described the thrill of finding rare wild orchids in the gardens there. Wiltshire was also a member of the British Bryological Society and was honorary field meetings secretary for the Botanical Society of the British Isles. In addition, she spent one day a week doing voluntary work in the botany department of London’s Natural History Museum, and from 2003 held the title of scientific associate there. Over the course of her career as a botanist, Wiltshire published more than twenty papers on diverse topics such as biodiversity, mosses, the flora of two London parks and liverworts in the London area and Limerick, and is cited in many more; she often used her camera to illustrate her findings.
In addition to botany and her travel to the USSR, Wiltshire further explored her creative side while in London. In the 1980s she drew designs based on London scenes that she turned into tapestries of wool on canvas. In all she created fifty graphic tapestries, twelve of which she donated to the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). At the age of ninety-four Wiltshire announced that she was ‘ready for a fresh start’ and moved back to Dublin (Irish Times, 6 May 2017). She died on 20 January 2017 in Glengara Park nursing home, Glenageary, Dublin, and her remains were cremated following a humanist ceremony at Mount Jerome cemetery, Dublin.
In 1994 Wiltshire donated over 1,000 negatives and 300 prints, as well as audio and film material of Patrick Kavanagh taken by Reggie, to the NLI’s National Photographic Archive. They were first presented in the exhibition ‘If you ever go to Dublin town’ in 1999 and a book of the same title, with text by photographer Orla Fitzpatrick, was published in the same year. Wiltshire’s photos were the subject of an episode (aired 10 September 2023) of Marty’s big picture show, a six-part RTÉ television series.