A Dublin Medical Community’s Appeal — Kathleen Bayne’s Letter, 1959

The Letter

A private appeal for three children’s education.

Writing on 20 June 1959, Kathleen Bayne tells “Phil” that she had attended a committee meeting of friends of the late Dr John Cussen. The committee had agreed to approach his immediate colleagues for financial support for the education of his three children, recorded in the letter as aged eleven, nine and three.

The proposed mechanism is unusually specific. Bayne suggests a covenant of £5–£10 per annum for twelve years, ending on the donor’s death, or alternatively a single donation to be pooled with the other contributions, invested and allowed to accrue until needed for “College or Technical School fees”. The second page asks the recipient either to provide details for a banker’s order or to send a single donation for transmission to the fund.

As a manuscript record, the letter captures the practical response of a professional circle to sudden family loss: not merely condolence, but the organisation of a long-term educational safety net.

The Writer

Dr Ivy Kathleen Bayne and Dublin’s medical network.

Research identifies the signatory as Dr Ivy Kathleen Bayne (née Faith), a medical doctor whose correspondence is represented in the Albert Joseph McConnell papers at Trinity College Dublin. Professional medical records list I. Kathleen Bayne with the qualifications M.B. and D.A.

She was married to Alexander Wallace “Alec” Bayne, managing director of Irish Life Assurance and a figure closely involved with Dublin hospital administration. That background helps explain why a letter of this kind could move naturally through overlapping medical, professional and philanthropic networks.

The manuscript itself is the primary evidence: it is signed “Kathleen Bayne” and written from “Marathon, Killiney, Co. Dublin”.

The Cussen Family

The nine-year-old child later wrote about the loss.

Michael Cussen, later a family physician in Nova Scotia, published a personal account of his Dublin childhood in 2015. In Gloomy in Glenburn he recalls being nine years old when his father died and names his sister Candy and younger brother John Paul. Those circumstances closely correspond with the three children aged eleven, nine and three described in Bayne’s 1959 fundraising letter.

Cussen’s later testimony gives the document an unusual afterlife. The letter records what the adults around the family were organising at the time; decades later, one of the children described the emotional consequences of the same loss from inside the family.

Marathon, Killiney

A named house anchors the letter to south Dublin.

Local architectural research identifies Marathon among the large Victorian houses of Killiney Hill Road. Historical work on the district also records the earlier name Mount Druid in connection with the property. The printed letterhead therefore provides more than a postal address: it fixes the manuscript within the residential geography of mid-century Killiney.

The contrast is part of the document’s interest. A letter written from one of Killiney’s substantial houses concerns the very practical problem of protecting three children’s future educational costs after a father’s death.

Documentary Significance

Small-scale social history with named people and a defined purpose.

This is not an institutional circular or printed charity appeal. It is a personal manuscript sent from one professional contact to another, setting out a specific financial plan and asking for participation. The survival of both pages preserves the entire argument, the proposed mechanism, the ages of the children and the writer’s signature.

Its value lies in that concentration of evidence: Dublin medical networks, private philanthropy, education, family bereavement and Killiney social geography contained in a two-page letter.