Long distance love

Soon after Ruth’s arrival in Dublin in 1901 she met the man she would eventually marry, Charles Lane Poole. Born in Easebourne, a village in Sussex, England, Charles came from a dynasty of English scholars and orientalists. His father, Stanley Lane-Poole was an archaeologist and an expert in Middle Eastern numismatics. On Stanley’s appointment as Professor of Arabic Studies at Trinity College, Dublin, the Lane-Poole family moved to Dublin where Charles attended St Columba’s College before embarking on an engineering course. These studies were terminated when Charles suffered a shooting accident which required the amputation of his left hand and its replacement with a metal hook prosthesis.

Charles then enrolled in the prestigious forestry course at l’Ecole Nationale des Eaux et Forêts at Nancy in France from which he graduated in 1906. He travelled first to the Cape Colony and subsequently to the Transvaal and Sierra Leone to establish and further his career. When considering asking Ruth to marry him, he raised the matter with his superior, C. E. Legat, Conservator of the Transvaal Forest Department. Legat vetoed any suggestion that Ruth might join him in the Transvaal, advising him that ‘it would be quite out of the question to take an Englishwoman there and I understand you intend to get married’.

In a further blow, Legat dismissed Charles’s reasons for wanting to resign to return to Ireland, pointing out that ‘the reasons you give for desiring to leave this Department seem scarcely inadequate to me’. For Ruth and Charles, it would be a long-distance engagement followed by their wedding in Dublin in July 1911, and a lonely start apart to married life.