Page 110 - GAHS Journal Volume 9

A QUIET WOMAN?

immeasurable grief is etched into the stone - friends, relatives,
perhaps even lovers, swept away.

Of three thousand undergraduates, graduates, and staff of
Trinity in service, 471 died, 54 of them in the Dardanelles.
Gallipoli resonates: the terrible casualties at Suvla Bay took the
lives of twenty Trinity men, including Everard Digges la Touche,
killed on 7 August 1915. William survived that carnage, but
Neville Johnston Figgis and Frederick Gibson Heuston, the two
boys who had played those games with Averil at Craan in 1909
did not, nor did both of Marion Duggan’s cousins, George and
Jack - killed on the same day within hours of each other.

And the women were not
untouched: Kathleen Burgess’
cousin Meta, a VAD in Le
Havre, was invalided back to
London where she died in
January 1919. The
10
aftermath must have been
rendered all the more difficult
by the return of shattered
bodies and minds, and further
exacerbated by the huge loss
of life in the influenza
epidemic.

In January 1919 Averil’s
mother presided over the
meeting of the Irish War
Hospital Supplies Depot at
the West’s Mount Offaly

10 A memorial with her name is in St. Stephen’s Church Upper Mount St
Dublin.
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