Eileen Duggan

Eileen May Duggan (21 May 1894 – 10 December 1972) OBE was a New Zealand poet and journalist, from an Irish Roman Catholic family. She worked in Wellington as a journalist, and wrote a weekly article for the Catholic weekly The New Zealand Tablet for almost fifty years.

She was born in Tuamarina near Blenheim in Marlborough, the youngest of four daughters of John and Julia Duggan. They were both from County Kerry, Ireland, and had married in Wellington on 7 October 1885. John was a platelayer on the New Zealand Railways.

She attended Tuamarina School from 1901 to 1910 and Marlborough High School. She taught as a pupil teacher at Tuamarina School from 1912 to 1913, and attended Wellington Teachers Training College from 1914 to 1915. She studied at Victoria University College, Wellington from 1916, receiving a BA in 1916, and a MA with first class honours in history in 1918, and was awarded the Jacob Joseph Scholarship. She taught at Dannevirke High School in 1918, then at Marlborough High School, St Patrick’s College, Wellington, and was an assistant lecturer at Victoria University College for one year. She was deeply affected by the death of her sister Evelyn in 1921, and after briefly staying with her other married sister Mary moved about 1925 to the Catholic Girls’ Hostel in Wellington. Her other sister Catherine (or Katherine) had entered the Order of Our Lady of the Missions.

She had continued ill health from a childhood sickness, so decided to give up teaching. Partly for the same reason she decided not to marry in 1918 and in 1940. She supported herself by journalism, with a weekly article in the The New Zealand Tablet, writing the women’s page under the pen name of Pippa. The first article appeared in the issue of 7 September 1927, and the last posthumously on 17 January 1973. She also wrote items for newspapers like The Dominion of Wellington. She lived in inner-city Wellington in Glencoe Terrace off The Terrace, in a weird canyon in the heart of the city up flights of precipitous stairs.

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