Emily de Burgh Daly

Emily Lucy de Burgh Daly (7 August 1859 – 13 November 1935) was an Irish nurse, writer, and traveller.

Life Emily de Burgh Daly was born Emily Lucy French on 7 August 1859 at the family home at Clooneyquin, County Roscommon, a townland between Elphin and Tulsk. She was the fourth daughter of the nine children of Christopher French and Susan Emma French (née Percy). One of her older brothers was the humorist and songwriter Percy French. She was educated privately at home, with the children producing their own theatricals and family magazines.

Daly left home in 1888, training as a nurse at the Mildmay Hospital, Bethnal Green, London. After this she travelled to Ningbo, China, nursing and going on to take charge of a hospital for women. During her 25 years in China, she attempted to learn the language but never mastered it. When she married Charles de Burgh-Daly in October 1890, she gave up nursing. Charles was the port doctor for Ningbo and director of the Church Missionary Society Hospital. Her son, Charles de Burgh-Daly fell at Ginchy aged only 19 during the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and is remembered in a WW1 memorial in St John's Church, Sandymount, Dublin.

The family had moved to Niuzhuang, southern Manchuria in 1893, where they took in refugees from the Sino-Japanese war in 1894. During this time, Daly travelled around China extensively, witnessing the run up to the Boxer Rebellion and the Russo-Japanese War, escaping the country with her children during both of those conflicts. The descriptions of these conflicts in Manchuria are detailed, accurate and harrowing. She befriended the travel writer Isabella Bird (married name Bird-Bishop) then a well-known travel writer whom she met in, Manchuria. Emily's husband was recalled from Ireland in 1910 to aid in the treatment of those suffering from the pneumonic plague.