BARBARA Miller (nee Thompson) lived all her life in the house where she was born at Highfield Road, Rathgar, Dublin. In a time when few remain a lifetime in their childhood homes, Barbara was proud in an understated manner of her Rathgar affiliations. She was prouder still of her parents and in particular her father, Charles Gerald Thompson, who migrated from Cushendall to study at TCD and then took up a teaching post in Mountjoy School, Mountjoy Square.
Barbara was the fourth generation of her family to study a TCD. She participated fully in student life, becoming president of the Fabian Society and of the SRC. She graduated in Natural Sciences and was elected a Trinity Scholar in 1950. After a teaching stint in Alexandra College, she moved to the geology department in UCD, then after a maternity break she went to work in Clongowes Wood, before transferring to geography in UCD, where she became an integral and much appreciated staff member. Teaching was in her blood both parents were teachers - and her most fulfilling role was in introducing successive classes of first year students to the Wicklow/Dublin mountain landscapes she herself had traversed with her parents.
Barbara engaged with community when subsidiarity and sustainability were unknown. She was judge of the Young Scientist of the Year for some ten years; a life member of the Dublin Zoological Society; president of the Dublin Guild of the Irish Countrywoman's Association, an association in which she won prizes for public speaking and several disciplines of needle craft. She taught in An Grianan, the ICA college at Termonfeckin, and judged craft work at county shows. She had a long interest in that rare and ancient breed, the Irish water spaniel, was an enthusiastic member of the breed's association and bred with some success.
More recently, she was treasurer of the Irish Quaternary Association. She brought groups of Dutch enthusiasts to visit the great gardens of Ireland; was a judge in the front garden competition of the Rathgar Resident's Association, and presented carefully crafted talks on the history of Rathgar, Rathmines and Rathfarnham to local societies.
Barbara married John Miller in 1960. They made a complementary partnership, caring for their children George and Jane. Her family, together with Georg's fiancee, supported and abetted Barbara (knowing of her terminal life as she would have wished.
In her last days, the Hospice at Harold's Cross treated her with great dignity. Perhaps the lines from Joyce Grenfell quoted by her cousin Canon Carmody, who officiated at her funeral service, capture something of the Barbara we all knew and loved so well:
If I should go before the rest of you
Break not a flower not inscribe a stone
Nor, when I'm gone, speak in a
Sunday voice
But be the usual selves that I
have known.
Weep if you must
Parting is hell
But life goes on
So sing as well.