Born: March 23rd, 1943
Died: August 28th, 2022
Melissa Webb, who has died at the age of 79, was the first woman to sit on the board of the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin during a life of voluntary service characterised by her championing the rights of women and improvements in hospital services.
Her alma mater, Trinity College Dublin, awarded her an honorary doctorate in July 2008, when fellow conferees included Northern Ireland peacemaker John Hume and actor Robert Redford. The citation highlighted how she had “worked voluntarily and without self-interest, tirelessly and with deep commitment, for three causes close to her heart: Trinity College Dublin, the rights of women, and above all, the health of the nation”. When she was a Trinity student in the early 1960s, women had to be off campus by 6pm and dine separately because they were regarded as “a danger to the men”. A leading light in the Trinity Women Graduates’ Association, she also served as president of the Irish Federation of University Women.
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The second youngest of four children born to Prof William B Stanford, Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity and a senator, and his wife Dorothy (nee Wright), she grew up in Dalkey, Co Dublin, in a household that fostered inquiring minds. Consistently read to and asked to read out loud, “we were brought up to speak properly”, she said on a recording for Irish Life and Lore. Being a Church of Ireland family, she was aware of their “difference” in a predominantly Catholic State, particularly when she was the only one on the bus not crossing herself every time it passed a church.
Education at the all-girls Alexandra College from the age of 11 gave her further encouragement to speak out in a society that men organised to their advantage. She was to use that cultivated voice to great effect, as a dazzling debater at university and on into voluntary steering roles in various institutions and associations, always keen to amplify the voice of other women. Her gregarious and empathetic nature was a huge asset in keeping herself informed, forging friendships and navigating potentially divisive topics.
She took tips from women’s rights activist Hilda Tweedy, a founding member of the Irish Housewives Association in 1942, on making sure you achieved what you wanted in a non-confrontational way. Webb herself was a founding member of the Women’s Political Association in 1970, which elected Mary Robinson as its first president.
‘She was widely known for her intellect, energy, enthusiasm, strength of character, sense of humour, as someone who by nature was upbeat and cheerful’
“She had a word for everyone and invariably you could hear she was in the building long before you saw her,” the Rector of St Paul’s, Glenageary, Rev Gary Dowd, said at Webb’s funeral service. “She was widely known for her intellect, energy, enthusiasm, strength of character, sense of humour, as someone who by nature was upbeat and cheerful. She was a true progressive and ahead of her time.”
On graduating in French and English from Trinity, she taught in a Somerset school before marrying fellow Dubliner Michael Webb, a chartered quantity surveyor, at the age of 23 in 1966. They had met as teenagers in Dunmore East, Co Waterford, where both their families spent summer holidays.
Annual event
Her long association with the Rotunda Hospital started with the birth there of their first child Sarah, now a children’s writer, in 1969. In gratitude for the care, she invited friends to a “bring and buy” cake sale in her home to raise funds for the hospital. It became an annual event that outgrew the house, so they hired the town hall in Dalkey to run an enormous cake sale for several years.
From that she was invited on to the Friends of the Rotunda (now the Rotunda Foundation), which she was soon chairing. She was co-opted on to the Rotunda board in 1989 and was later to be vice-president. Fellow governors speak of her courageous and consistent advocacy for women, babies and families over the decades; her support of nursing/midwifery staff and her ability to make incisive points with a mischievous sense of humour. Despite being diagnosed with cancer four years ago, her involvement with the Rotunda continued right up to her last board meeting through Zoom in June of this year.
Her powers of persuasion were also tested as a key member of the Women’s Ministry Group pushing for the ordination of women in the Church of Ireland, which was achieved in 1990
She was also a governor of the National Children’s Hospital on Harcourt Street and chaired the board during the amalgamation with the Adelaide and Meath into one hospital that opened in Tallaght in 1998, where she sat on the new board. Her remark afterwards that “I never knew there was so much politics in medicine” was a nod to the fraught process that had played out behind closed doors. Her powers of persuasion were also tested as a key member of the Women’s Ministry Group pushing for the ordination of women in the Church of Ireland, which was achieved in 1990.
Family, immediate and extended, always came first. She tended the fold with care and relished her link to composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, her great uncle. Her husband credits her for 48 family members travelling from around the world to their “second home” of Castletownshend Co Cork for his 80th birthday celebrations on July 29th last, at which she was in irrepressible form. But her failing health declined rapidly soon after and she died in Wicklow Hospice one month later.
Melissa Webb is survived by her husband, Michael, their four children, Sarah, Kate, Emma and Richard, her sister Danae, brother Gully and nine grandchildren. She was predeceased by her brother Philip.