Abstract
This biographical paper examines the background of collections comprising illustrations of fungi and herbarium specimens attributed to Jessie O’Callaghan, held by the Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales. O’Callaghan was a privileged, wealthy woman born in the Welsh parish of Llandaff, which, in 1922, was incorporated into Cardiff, now Wales’ capital city. Upon her marriage in 1906 she moved to Ireland, but eventually settled in the English county of Surrey. Throughout her life she had an enduring interest in botany, seeking, collecting, painting, and cultivating rare plants. She shared this passion with Eleanor Vachell, the well-regarded Welsh amateur botanist, whom she had known since childhood. Entries in Eleanor’s diaries, and their letters, together with a surviving photograph album, provide fascinating insights into Jessie’s life. The paper also speculates on the fate of O’Callaghan’s collection of 595 watercolour paintings of wild flowers, loaned to the Museum by her daughter in 1932, but later returned to her.
Keywords
Introduction
This paper is a socio-botanical biography of Jessie O’Callaghan née Insole (Figure 1a), a talented botanical artist and collector and propagator of rare wild plants. It draws on Museum collections, archival documents and correspondence, images in Jessie O’Callaghan’s personal photograph album and entries in the personal diary of Eleanor Vachell. It principally focusses on a collection of her watercolour illustrations of fungi, and a number of herbarium specimens attributed to her, held by Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales. The collection of paintings of fungi was donated to the Museum in 1932, shortly after Jessie’s death, by her daughter Maureen O’Callaghan. The herbarium specimens are part of a much larger collection, amassed by the amateur botanists Charles Tanfield Vachell M.D. (1848–1914) and his daughter Eleanor Vachell (1879–1948), which was donated to Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales in 1949.
(a) Jessie Gwendoline O’Callaghan, 1907 and (b) Eleanor Vachell ©Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales.
Background and Early Life
Jessie was the first of six children who resulted from the union of wealthy coal owner George Frederick Insole (known as Fred) and Jessy Ann David, a member of a family of local landed gentry. The Insole family’s wealth was based on the contributions made by Jessie’s great grandfather George Insole (1790–1851) and grandfather James Harvey Insole (1821–1901) toward opening up the steam coal trade in the Rhondda Valley, in south Wales (Watson 1997). 1
Jessie’s siblings were Violet Adeline Lilly (1883–1932), Frederick Harvey (B&D 1885), George Claud Lathom (1887–1918), Eric Raymond (1880–1946), and Alan Vyvyan (1895–1964).2–5
Jessie was a life-long friend of Eleanor Vachell (Figure 1b). The Insole and Vachell families were close over several generations. Indeed, Jessie’s interest in wild flowers and fungi may have originated in her friendship with Eleanor Vachell and her father, Charles Tanfield Vachell, who were both keen naturalists and together built up a collection of 6,705 herbarium specimens.
Eleanor Vachell kept diaries which featured accounts of her botanical exploits (Forty and Rich 2005). These diaries record that Eleanor and Jessie frequently went on plant -hunting expeditions together and painted wild flowers. The first such record recounts a visit on holiday with the Insole family to Cromer in Norfolk in 1902. In 1904 Eleanor again accompanied the Insole family on holiday, this time to the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall, where they stayed at the Housel Bay Hotel and employed “old Jose,” thought to be Francis Jose, a local guide, to help them locate rare plant species.
It is likely that the Insole sisters received some training in the art of botanical illustration during their childhood. This was a time when botany was considered part of everyday life and mothers were encouraged to teach their children the rudiments of the subject. Indeed, Jessie’s mother herself became a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) in 1909. A talent for plant portraits was considered a useful accomplishment for young ladies being groomed for marriage (Pardoe and Lazarus 2018).
Marriage and Family Life
In 1904 Jessie Insole met Captain Richard Grainger Denis O’Callaghan (1879–1943) when he came to stay at her family’s home, Fairwater House, situated on the outskirts of Cardiff. Richard was a professional soldier who had seen active service in South Africa and at the time of their meeting was still a member of the Reserves. His family, well known for breeding racehorses, lived at Brackenstown House, near Swords, County Dublin in Ireland. 6
The couple were married in 1906, in a grand event held in Llandaff Cathedral. After their honeymoon in Cornwall, they began their married life at Cremona, a modest house set in its own grounds in Swords, County Dublin. 7 Jessie started a personal photograph album around this time which contains over 300 images. It chronicles their marriage up until about 1920. 8 They had two children, Maureen and Bryan, in quick succession. All four O’Callaghans are listed in the 1911 census, together with five household servants. In 1915 the family moved to the much grander Brackenstown House, rebuilt after having been destroyed by fire, which Richard had inherited from his mother.
In accordance with the conventions of their class, the O’Callaghans traveled, socialized, attended race meetings, and visited friends. The couple pursued many active hobbies typical of people of their status, including fishing, croquet and golf. Eleanor Vachell stayed with the O’Callaghans at Cremona in 1911. The trip included a visit to the Bellewstown races near Drogheda and a photograph of them at this event has survived in Jessie’s photograph album. Writing of her stay at Cremona, Eleanor recorded feeling uncomfortable as Jessie and her husband were not on speaking terms. This, together with the fact that Jessie left nothing to her husband in her will, tends to indicate that the marriage may not have been a particularly happy one.
Following the failed uprising of 1916, life in Ireland for the O’Callaghans was set against a backdrop of political unrest with frequent threats of danger from republican forces. In 1920, probably to escape the increasing political upheaval in Ireland, the family took a long holiday, staying at Ballimore House near the shores of Loch Fyne in Scotland. It was here, between 2 August and 15 September, that Jessie’s first paintings of fungi were undertaken.
During the Great War of 1914 to 1918 Richard had served as a major in the Royal Field Artillery in 5A Reserve Brigade. In 1919 he was awarded an MBE for his work with the Irish Recruiting Council. Exactly what part he played during the Irish War of Independence is unclear, but on 21 November 1920, thereafter known as Bloody Sunday, fourteen men whom the IRA claimed were spies for the British Secret Service were assassinated at various locations in Dublin. Major O’Callaghan was on the assassins’ hit list (Dolan 2020), but that night, possibly forewarned of the danger, he was not at the house in Fitzwilliam Square where the IRA had expected to find him, and he thus escaped the attack.
It seems likely that the O’Callaghan family left Brackenstown House on or just before Bloody Sunday. It is known that the house was then occupied by the IRA as a billet. The family spent Christmas and New Year of 1920/21 at The Court, Llandaff, into which Jessie’s parents had moved in 1908. 9 Here Jessie executed her next set of fungi paintings. The 1921 census taken on June 19th shows that the whole family, together with Richard’s brother Leslie, were listed at Baileys Hotel in Kensington, London.
As the Irish War of Independence continued, life in Ireland must have become fraught with danger, particularly for Richard, and there can be little doubt that this was the reason why the family moved to a new permanent home, Hangmoor, a twelve bedroomed mansion set in fourteen acres of grounds adjacent to Windsor Great Park in Virginia Water, Surrey. According to Eleanor Vachell, Jessie O’Callaghan “had been so delighted on leaving Ireland after The Rebellion to find that Lady Davy lived near her new home in Surrey” (Forty and Rich 2005). Lady Davy lived at West Byfleet where she kept “open house” for botanists of different ages and levels of experience (Desmond 1994). 10
Hangmoor was to be Jessie’s base for the final ten years of her life, close to which most of her subsequent paintings of fungi were undertaken.
Plant Collecting and Cultivation
Jessie was a dedicated botanist. She enjoyed collecting and painting plants with her great friend Eleanor Vachell, both before and after her marriage to Richard O’Callaghan. Her interest in botany was quite typical for one of her generation and situation. From childhood she shared an interest in plants with her sister Violet, who developed a reputation for award-winning irises (Bell and Bell 2019) and later Jessie’s husband, Richard, who won Royal Horticultural Society of Ireland prizes for his 50 varieties of narcissi. The girls’ paternal grandfather, James Harvey Insole, had been enthusiastic about developing and stocking his garden with rare and exotic species. This family interest was set against a background of other enthusiastic horticulturalists and botanists in the local area of south Wales, including horticulturalist and plant hunter Reginald Radcliffe Cory (1871–1934), with his extensive gardens in the grounds of Duffryn House, Vale of Glamorgan (now run by the National Trust), together with the Earl of Plymouth’s estate at St Fagans (now part of Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales), where the gardens were remodeled during the Edwardian period.
Cardiff Naturalists’ Society (CNS) was founded in 1867 and Charles Vachell was Honorary Secretary for nine years and was elected president on four occasions (Duigan and Whyman 2022). Amongst local naturalists there was a concerted effort to compile a comprehensive flora of Glamorgan. Thomas (2020) notes that the first attempt to list the flora of the eastern side of Glamorgan was undertaken by Charlotte Ollivant, daughter of the Bishop of Llandaff, and was published in the transactions of the CNS in 1873. Eleanor Vachell and her father acted as joint recording secretary for the Flora of Glamorgan which was originally published by the CNS in five sections between 1906 and 1911 (Duigan and Whyman 2022). Therefore, there was ample activity in the local area to sustain and perpetuate Jessie’s interests in botany.
Bell and Bell (2019) note that “Miss Insole,” was one of the members of the Cardiff Naturalists’ Society involved in the compilation of The Flora of Glamorgan in 1905, who contributed 91 records from Barry, Fairwater, and Porthkerry. 11 They attribute this contribution to Violet Insole. However, the original credit states “Miss Insole, Fairwater House.” At that time the unmarried Jessie would have correctly been referred to as “Miss Insole,” while Violet would have been “Miss Violet Insole.” It therefore seems likely that the credit should belong to Jessie rather than Violet.
Jessie and Eleanor went on several collecting trips together, usually in the British Isles. Eleanor’s diary mentions the girls “painting in their Benthams.” This refers to Bentham’s Handbook of the British Flora, which was the botanists’ bible at this time. The book had a companion octavo volume of black and white illustrations by Walter Hood Fitch. When Eleanor Vachell or the Insole sisters found and identified a new plant listed by Bentham they would colour in the illustration by Fitch, an unusual way of recording their finds. Eleanor subsequently moved on to R.W. Butcher & F. E. Strudwick’s Further Illustrations of British Plants. She died with only thirteen species left uncoloured, from a total of approximately 1,800 species. 12 Unfortunately, if it has survived, the whereabouts of Jessie’s copy of Bentham’s handbook is unknown.
At home Jessie spent a good part of her leisure time collecting, painting, and cultivating plants. For example, in her photograph album there is an image taken at Cremona about 1912 which shows several cloches in the rockery, placed to provide protection for sensitive plants. In an undated letter on Cremona headed notepaper and therefore probably written prior to her move to Brackenstown in 1915, Jessie noted that Draba hirta, collected from the top of Ben Lawes, the highest peak in Perthshire, Scotland, had flowered in her garden. 13 There is a similar photograph showing small cloches in the garden of her subsequent home at Brackenstown.
In April 1923 Jessie invited Eleanor Vachell to stay at Hangmoor, so that they could search for plants together and also meet Dr Druce in Oxford, to search for more rarities. 14 “There was much to interest her at Hangmoor, Jessie O’Callaghan’s excellent paintings of British wild flowers and fungi, her painted Bentham and the splendid rock garden with its pretty pond, around which, with infinite patience and great skill, Jessie O’Callaghan had grown many rare native plants, some of which they had collected together in past years” (Forty and Rich 2005).
Jessie was a member of the Botanical Exchange Club and the Wild Flower Society. These organizations offered opportunities for respectable ladies to travel all over Britain and Ireland with fellow enthusiasts in search of rare plants. For example, Jessie and Eleanor took part in a five-day trip to Jersey in 1923, during which they found many rare species, under the guidance of local botanists. Through these expeditions Jessie became acquainted with many of the prominent botanists of the day, whose core members Eleanor Vachell nicknamed “the Trudgeleers.”
Such excursions would have provided excellent opportunities for the members to share their botanical expertise and their knowledge of the localities of rare plants, and also to provide a network of mutual support in their efforts. For example, in September 1923 a party including Jessie O’Callaghan, Eleanor Vachell, Mrs Knowling, and Lady Davy went hunting for rare plants at locations around Glamorganshire, including Thornhill and Southerndown. Mrs Knowling and Lady Davy stayed with Eleanor Vachell and went to visit Jessie O’Callaghan, who was staying at The Court, early in the visit. The group was driven round the Vale of Neath and the Gower peninsula by Miss Page, a local botanist from Porthcawl. There followed a reciprocal visit by Eleanor Vachell to Lady Davy in Surrey.
Jessie, like her mother before her, was also a Fellow of the RHS, but this title did not have the same connotations that it does now—rather it was similar to being a member today.
Collections Held at Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales
Botanical Illustrations
The most significant of Jessie O’Callaghan’s collections held by Amgueddfa Cymru —Museum Wales is a set of three albums, containing 156 paintings of fungi, which are listed in Table 1. They were painted by Jessie between 1920 and 1926 and have been described by Lazarus and Pardoe (2003) as “a delightful record of the fungi that she found. Quite naïve in style, they are typical of the period.”
List of Species of Fungi Painted by Jessie O’Callaghan.
Note. One of the Dunkeld paintings is dated February 20, 1920, but this date is suspected to be an error. The current nomenclature is in accordance with http://www.speciesfungorum.org.
In the late summer of 1920, the O’Callaghans took a six-week holiday, staying at Ballimore House near Otter Ferry on Loch Fyne, Scotland. At that time of the year there would have been few interesting flowers in bloom for Jessie to paint. However, there would have been lots of fungi starting to appear, so she must have decided to turn her attention to painting them instead. The Ballimore area evidently provided a goodly number of different fungal habitats as this was her most productive period of painting fungi, with 55 having been completed during the holiday (see Appendix). Jessie painted a further 22 fungi during salmon fishing trips to Dunkeld in Perthshire, between 14 February and 27 March 1921.
The rest of the paintings of fungi were executed in Wales and England. Most of the Welsh examples were painted between 30 December 1920 and 16 January 1921 at The Court and at the Insole family’s shooting lodge Ty Vri, near Pendoylan in the Vale of Glamorgan. Four paintings were produced in the autumn of 1920 in Sussex, but the bulk of the English paintings were executed at or in the vicinity of Hangmoor, in the autumn of 1922, immediately after the family had moved there. The last of Jessie’s paintings of fungi was done at Stroude, Virginia Water, on 1 April 1926. Her artistic talent was finally recognized at the Chelsea Flower Show in 1930, when she was awarded a silver Grenfell medal for her watercolours of British fungi. Two of Jessie’s illustrations of fungi (Amanita rubescens Pers. and Amanita muscaria (L.) Hook.) have been published (Lazarus and Pardoe 2003) and several have been reproduced as postcards for sale at what is now known as Insole Court. A further example, Polystictus versicolor, is shown in Figure 2.
Polystictus versicolor painted by Jessie O’Callaghan at The Court, Llandaff, 1 January, 1921 ©Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales.
Jessie O’Callaghan is also known to have painted hundreds of flowering plants. Indeed, the following advertisement appeared in the Personal Notes of the Report by the Botanical Exchange Club (1923–1925): “Mrs O’Callaghan, Hangmoor, Virginia Water, Surrey, is painting British Plants, and will be glad to receive local specimens in flower. She will gladly defray the cost of the transmission.” In her diary Eleanor recounts that in 1926 Jessie came to Cardiff by train specially to paint the rare purple poppy Roemeria hybrida, which had appeared in an allotment. Between 1932 and 1937, 595 of these paintings were on long-term loan to Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales—see legacy section below.
Herbarium Specimens
In addition, Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales holds 50 vascular plant herbarium specimens collected by Jessie Insole/O’Callaghan between 1904 and 1926 from 21 vice-counties (Harrison 1985); see Table 2. In most cases she is the sole collector, but sometimes Eleanor Vachell is also noted as a co-collector and, in a few cases, there are other co-collectors including Dr G. D. Claridge Druce, Mr Attenborough, Lady Davy and E.S. Gregory (Desmond 1994). These herbarium specimens were part of the private herbarium collection of 6,705 specimens that were primarily collected by Eleanor and her father Charles Tanfield Vachell, but which included some collected by her friends and associates. In 1949, following Eleanor’s death, the collection was donated to Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales. An example, Galinsoga parviflora, is shown in Figure 3.
List of Jessie O’Callaghan’s Herbarium Specimens Held at Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales, Cardiff.
Herbarium specimen of Galinsoga parviflora, collected by Jessie O’Callaghan near London, 1924 ©Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales.
During the time that Jessie O’Callaghan lived in Swords the main Irish National Herbarium would have been held in the Natural History Museum in Dublin city. The deputy curator in Dublin at the time, Matilda Cullen Knowles, was an expert on cryptogams and had an interest in fungi, so the two may have been acquainted. 15 This suggestion is supported by the fact that the Irish Herbarium contains a specimen of Allium schoenoprasum from Swords, collected by Jessie O’Callaghan on 8 July 1911. The date coincides with Eleanor Vachell’s visit.
Significant specimens
The collection of illustrations of fungi contains a new record for the cup fungus Anthopeziza mirabilis (now known as Microstoma protractum (Fr.) Kanouse). According to Spooner (2002), this has only ever been recorded in Britain in one place near Ballater in the catchment of the River Dee, Aberdeenshire, first in 1890 and once again in 1911, and it is now believed to be extinct in Britain. However, Jessie O’Callaghan painted it on 17th March 1921 in the Dunkeld area, which is in the catchment of the River Tay in Perthshire (Figure 4). This painting is therefore thought to be a new record for this species.
Anthopeziza mirabilis (now known as Microstoma protractum (Fr.) Kanouse), painted by Jessie O’Callaghan ©Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales.
The herbarium specimen of Arenaria ciliata collected by Jessie and held by Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales (Accession No. 49.29.586) is labeled as having been collected at Ballyvaughan, (Co. Clare, Ireland) on 8th June 1912. However, this species is only recorded by other botanists from Ben Bulben, Co Sligo, Ireland and, as the flora of the area around Ballyvaughan has been intensively studied, this labeling is likely to be an error. 16 This is further substantiated by the fact that there is an image of Ben Bulben mountain in Jessie’s photograph album and on the same page there are also images of nearby Benwiskin mountain and Sligo town, together with a hotel in Ballyvaughan and the Spectacle Bridge in Lisdoonvana. These indicate that she probably visited these locations on the same trip.
Publication
In 1911 Jessie O’Callaghan published a short article entitled “County Dublin Plants” in the Irish Naturalist, recording her new finds of Vaccinium oxycoccus on the mountains of Kippure and Seefingan at a height of approximately 1,700 ft. above sea level (O’Callaghan 1911). She also mentions seeing Helleborus fœtidus growing wild near Julianstown.
Death and Legacy
Jessie O’Callaghan died of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1932, five days before her fiftieth birthday, with her husband Richard at her side. She was buried in the graveyard of Christ Church, Virginia Water, which is situated immediately adjacent to Hangmoor. Her children, Bryan and Maureen, are named as her executors and as the joint beneficiaries of her residual estate. It is perhaps telling that Jessie did not bequeath anything to her husband in her will. In it she records that the property she leaves to her children includes a sum of £4,254.14s.5d that she had lent to their father in May 1922, possibly to enable the purchase of their family home, Hangmoor. Within a year of Jessie’s death Richard had sold Hangmoor and remarried.
Jessie O’Callaghan specifically referred to her paintings in her will, indicating their importance to her. She bequeathed her botanical illustrations to her daughter Maureen. However, she also stated that, if her daughter did not want the illustrations, she “requested but did not require” that they be given to the National Museum of Wales. The correspondence of the Keeper of Botany, H.A. Hyde, kept in the Botany archives at Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales, reveals that Maureen duly donated the three albums of illustrations of fungi to the Museum on 31 March 1932.
Hyde’s correspondence also shows that in September 1932 Maureen deposited a further 595 water colour drawings of flowering plants, ferns, and conifers at the Museum on “permanent” loan. In a letter to the Director in September 1932 Hyde writes “The present collection was offered to me, during your absence, on September 19th through Miss Vachell who assured me that the drawings were, in her opinion, superior to those in the Drinkwater collection; they had, moreover, been exhibited with great success at the Royal Horticultural Society’s shows in London and they had also been much commended by the late Dr G.C. Druce F.R.S.” 17
The loan was arranged through the good auspices of Eleanor Vachell, who was responsible for extending the botany collections of Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales through her own collecting and through her influence on others. Eleanor doubtless wished to ensure that her friend’s collection was properly cared for and preserved. A list accompanying Hyde’s correspondence (Figure 5) shows that most of the paintings were probably bound in a series of twelve books, presumably in a similar way to the albums of Jessie’s paintings of fungi. At the same time Maureen also donated three of her mother’s books. 18 One bears Jessie’s signature, and all three are still held in the Museum’s collection.
Listing of the watercolour drawings of flowering plants, ferns, and conifers formerly loaned to Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales (1932–37/9) ©Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales.
However, further examination of the correspondence in the archives reveals that, some five years later, Maureen asked that the illustrations of flowering plants be returned to her. All but eighteen, which were on display in the Museum at that time, were returned to her on 14 January 1937. It is difficult to know why Maureen wanted the illustrations back. It could be speculated that she was temporarily short of funds and intended to sell them. Indeed, Hyde had helped her sell some books in 1934 and she tells him in a letter that she is very pleased with the cheques that she had received. In 1937 she and her partner Henry Priest, whom she eventually married in Ireland in 1942, had a trip to the USA planned. So, it is possible that she intended to sell the paintings in New York to pay for the trip. However, this does not explain what happened to the remaining eighteen paintings, which were not returned to her until 24 August 1939. Maureen, who died in Ireland in 1970 leaving a substantial estate, does not mention the drawings in her will. Unfortunately, no records or photographs of these paintings have been found and the fate and present locality of the flowering plant illustrations remains a tantalizing mystery.
Conclusions
Relatively little is known about Jessie O’Callaghan, but snippets from Eleanor Vachell’s diary and images in Jessie’s photograph album provide fascinating insights. What is evident is her enthusiasm for plant—hunting, botanical illustration, and gardening. The passion for plants developed in girlhood sustained her in later years and may well have become her principal source of relief from the strains of married life. She seems to have derived great pleasure from her plant-hunting expeditions with Eleanor Vachell and the Wild Flower Society. These trips provided the freedom to pursue her hobby and to spend time with like-minded botanists.
Jessie O’Callaghan was well known in botanical circles, and typical of many women of her generation, she was a keen botanist and an accomplished botanical artist. Several of her contemporaries have left similar delightful sets of plant portraits including Holden (1977), Gwendolen Crowley, Margaret Towers, and the Frampton family (Lazarus and Pardoe 2003; Pardoe and Lazarus 2018). Examination of the lists of her botanical illustrations and herbarium specimens suggests that Jessie mainly painted and collected close to her home or when she was on holiday. Those specimens that were collected from further afield are mainly collected on organized botanical expeditions with her friends, particularly Eleanor Vachell. There were several occasions when the visitors consulted local experts, such as Mr Attenborough in Jersey, on the locations of rare plants.
It is clear from Eleanor Vachell’s diary and her correspondence with Jessie that the friends enjoyed each other’s company and provided mutual support, the one a fiercely independent spinster and the other constrained by marital and domestic duties. Eleanor Vachell became an authority on the flora of Glamorgan and was closely associated with the National Museum of Wales (now Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales) from its foundation in 1907. During WW1 she acted as temporary curator of the botany collections after the Assistant Keeper, Lieutenant Cyril Mortimer Green, was killed on active service (Cleal et al. 2022, Duigan and Whyman 2022). She held several prestigious positions, including President of the CNS, Fellow of the Linnean Society and Governor and Council Member of the National Museum of Wales (Duigan and Whyman 2022). On her death, she donated her herbarium collection to the National Museum of Wales, together with a generous bequest to support the publication of the flora of Glamorgan. It is thanks to her influence and intervention that Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales received Jessie O’Callaghan’s herbarium specimens and botanical illustrations.
Unlike Eleanor, Jessie had a limited impact on the advancement of botany as a science, with her sphere of influence largely restricted to her family and her acquaintances in botanical clubs. Neither Jessie nor Eleanor studied for a degree. It was rare that women of their generation had access to a university education. 19 Shteir (1996) notes that in Victorian times women were usually excluded from membership of scientific societies. For example, both the Linnean Society and the Royal Society were closed to women until the twentieth century. However, the Botanical Society was unusual in having a non-discriminatory membership policy with women accounting for 10 percent of its membership (Shteir 1996). Up until 1903, when the rules were relaxed for Eleanor Vachell, discussion of biology at the CNS was not considered suitable for a mixed assembly of men and women (Duigan and Whyman 2022).
Attitudes toward women’s role in society gradually became less restrictive in the Edwardian period. In 1918 the limited granting of the vote recognized the huge contribution women had made during World War One. Nevertheless, the voices of married ladies such as Jessie O’Callaghan continued to have little influence in scientific groups where men dominated. Occasionally, indomitable women such as Eleanor Vachell, Anna Maria Hussey (Pardoe and Lazarus 2018), Marie Stopes (Fraser and Cleal 2007; Shteir 1996), and Ethel Miles Thomas (Cleal et al. 2022) gained influence through family or personal connections or associations with scientific institutions such as Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales. However, apart from Eleanor, Jessie had no connections of this kind, and details of her work have remained largely unknown.
It is largely thanks to the diaries of Eleanor Vachell and her close connection to the Museum that we know of Jessie O’Callaghan’s botanical endeavours and have a tangible record of her work. Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales is fortunate to hold collections of her fungus paintings and herbarium specimens, though what has happened to her extensive collection of wildflower paintings remains a mystery. The donation of her photograph album to Insole Court has also helped to piece together her personal history.
Footnotes
Appendix
Acknowledgements
Details of the life of Eleanor Vachell can be found on the Cardiff Naturalists’ webpages 
. Additional information was kindly provided by Sally Whyman and Jennifer Evans from Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales. We are grateful to Tim Rich and Colin Kelleher for their advice on herbarium specimens collected by Jessie O’Callaghan. We also thank Dr. Joanne Taylor of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, for her advice on fungus identification and information provided by Cliona Byrne, National Botanic Gardens, Dublin, Ireland.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
1.
George Insole (1790–1851) who was not only a coal owner but was also instrumental in the promotion of the export of coal out of the port of Cardiff and grandfather James Harvey Insole (1821–1901), who continued in his father’s footsteps helping develop the coal trade in the Rhondda valley north of Cardiff by sinking to the steam coal seams at Cymmer, deep beneath the valley, thus ensuring the family’s prosperity for the next generation.
2.
4.
Eric Raymond Insole accompanied Baden Powell, founder of the Scout Movement, as an aide on his world tour in 1912. He was the last of the Insole family to hold a directorship in Insoles Ltd, which was wound up in 1938.
5.
6.
7.
The house was named after the Battle of Cremona which took place in 1702, when the Austrians were trying to retake the Italian town from the occupying French. Both armies included Irish soldiers. At the time of writing, it still exists but is unoccupied.
8.
Jessie’s photograph album was donated to the Insole Court Archive Research Group by Mary Priest, the widow of one of Jessie’s grandchildren.
9.
The Court, Llandaff, formerly known as Ely Court and now known as Insole Court, was built by Jessie’s paternal grandfather James Harvey Insole in 1855 and extended several times by him in the nineteenth century. It was further extended by Jessie’s father in 1907/8. This Grade 2 listed property, now run by the Insole Court Trust, is open to the public. See https://www.insolecourt.org/. The Grade 2* listed gardens of the house, also open to the public, are mostly maintained by Cardiff Parks Department. See
13.
The letter is attached to the herbarium sample of Draba hirta collected by Jessie held by Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales.
15.
Colin Kelleher (personal communication).
16.
Tim Rich (personal communication).
17.
Dr Harold Drinkwater (1855–1925) was an eminent physician, who lived in Wrexham from 1890 onwards. He was a talented artist and painted many portraits of local plants in gouache, combining this with his work as a general practitioner. He donated a collection of 385 works to Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales in 1920 ().
18.
19.
Author Biographies
and is the author of a monograph entitled Penarth Alabaster.