Overview
Jean O'Neill, Baroness O'Neill of the Maine (16 January 1915 – 15 July 2008) was an English plantswoman and horticulturalist.
Early life and family
Jean O'Neill was born Katharine Jean Whitaker at 41 Brook Street, Mayfair, London on 16 January 1915. Her parents were William Ingham Whitaker and Hilda Guilhermina (née Dundas). Her father was a landowner and horticulturalist of Pylewell Park, near Lymington, Hampshire. Her maternal grandfather was the Scottish peer, Charles Dundas, 6th Viscount Melville. She had four siblings, and grew up at the family estate Pylewell Park, which had extensive gardens which had been developed by her father and grandfather. Interested in botany from a young age, O'Neill would follow her father and head gardener when they selected new specimens. She was educated at home alongside her older sisters. She was more interested in gardening and outdoor activities than the London social life, but she travelled to Europe with fellow debutante and friend, Anne Hamilton-Grace, first to Hungary, and then the Balkans by taking an old Ford V8 car from England. O'Neill visited her friend, Unity Mitford, in Munich but was horrified by Mitford's Nazi sympathies. She joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment during World War II, nursing the wounded in Grimsby and then the Royal Naval Hospital at Gosport, Hampshire.
She was acquainted with Terence O'Neill for a number of years, and while he was serving with the Irish Guards, they married on 4 February 1944 in the Guards' Chapel in Wellington Barracks, London. He was wounded in September 1944, and was evacuated from the Netherlands to Pylewell Park, remaining there until the end of the war. In 1946, the couple moved to a former rectory outside Ahoghill, County Antrim, Glebe House.
Life in Northern Ireland
O'Neill was a loyal supporter of her husband's political career in Northern Ireland, from his first election to Stormont as an MP in 1946 to his time as Northern Ireland prime minister from 1963 to 1969. She accompanied him on visits to Great Britain, Europe and the United States. During the first official visit of a Northern Ireland prime minister to France in 1966, O'Neill stood in for her husband to make a speech at an official banquet when he was recalled to Belfast due to an emergency.
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).
