People on board

GREENE, Hilda Ball

Hilda Ball Greene was born on the 4th of September 1873 at Ardkill, Killiney, Co Dublin to John Ball Greene and Charlotte Mary Courtenay. John Ball Greene was a Surveyor who had worked on the Great Western Railway in England under Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He then joined the staff of the General Valuation and Boundary Survey in Ireland under Richard Griffith, in 1868 taking over from Griffith as Commissioner of Valuation. When he married Charlotte Courtenay in 1867 he was a widower, having married Ellen Wesley in 1843. Hilda was the third of their four children.

John Ball Greene was a magistrate for Dublin, a Commissioner for the Pembroke township in Dublin and he served on the Board of the Provincial Bank. He was a civil engineer and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He was knighted Commander of the Bath in 1885. The family was living in Raglan Road in Dublin when he died in 1896, aged seventy-three. Lady Charlotte Ball Greene and her two unmarried daughters, Maud and Hilda, moved to Greystones, living at ‘Corrella’ in the Burnaby from at least 1911.

Hilda Ball Greene worked with the British Red Cross when the war began. Her V.A.D. card states that she worked at the I.W.W. (I.W.C.?) Hospital Supply Depot and in the Sphagnum Moss Depot in Greystones.

From February 1917 until December 1918 she worked in the Red Cross Hospital in Cheltenham for periods of four to five months at a time. She may have been returning to duty in London when she travelled on RMS Leinster on the 10th of October 1918. She survived the sinking and her V.A.D. record shows that she was back at work in Cheltenham on the 15th of November.

On the 13th of November her name was listed in the Irish Independent as contributing £100 to the Mansion House Leinster Victims fund. Her life before, and probably after, was that of a socially concerned wealthy woman. She was on the committee of the Children’s Home in Delgany, she worked on stalls in church fetes and she was named in 1913 as being among those who regularly contributed newspapers, magazines and periodicals to Greystones Library. Her mother Charlotte died in 1924 aged eighty-five and was buried in the Courtenay plot in Mount Jerome cemetery, followed by her brother Henry Leland who died in 1925.

Maud and Hilda continued to live in ‘Corrella’ until the 1930s, moving within Greystones to ‘Selston’. In January 1937 Hilda advertised for sale a “Morris Cowley Tourer, 11.8 h.p Hotchkiss Engine 1924, with five very good tyres, small mileage, well maintained, one owner”. Maud died in December 1937 in the Hibernian Hotel in Dublin and Hilda died in October 1942 in Portobello Nursing Home in Dublin at the age of sixty-eight. Both women were buried in Christ Church Cemetery in Delgany.