This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Linde Lunney. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 3 July 1916, Ireland
Died: 11 June 2007
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Clare Rosemary Tiernan
Reddan, Clare Rosemary (‘Clarrie’) (née Tiernan) (1916–2007), golfer, was born 3 July 1916 in Co. Louth, one of two daughters of Andrew Joseph Tiernan, who worked in the offices of a milling company in Dublin, and his wife Mary Victoria (née Connolly). Clarrie attended Loreto College on St Stephen’s Green, Dublin. The family was interested in sports, including hunting and racing; Clarrie’s mother played golf and was honorary secretary for forty years at the Co. Louth Golf Club, a links course, also known as Baltray. Clarrie learned to play golf there as a girl, and won her first competition in 1932 in Baltray, aged just 16. In May 1935, aged 18, already ladies’ captain of Baltray, she astonished observers with a ‘splendid triumph’ over an English international player who had just set a course record at the Royal Co. Down course in Newcastle, in the women’s amateur championship there, though Tiernan subsequently went out in the third round. A month later she competed in the ladies’ championship at Rosapenna, Co. Donegal, producing in the first round ‘an exhibition of golfing fireworks’ (Ir. Times, 5 June 1935). She represented Ireland in an international competition that summer, crucially winning her match to achieve a long-awaited victory over England. She subsequently competed for Ireland in the home internationals in 1936, 1938, 1939, 1947, 1948, 1949 and 1955.
In 1936 Tiernan played the Hon. Patrick Gordon Campbell in a fourball at Baltray; he recorded in his Round Ireland with a golf bag (1936) that she had clearly enjoyed her round of 76 strokes and that it had been very little effort for her. He ruefully acknowledged that if he had given her the then customary allowance of nine shots for a woman playing a man, he would have been beaten by the time they reached the 10th hole. Campbell was not surprised when later that same year in Ballybunion, Co. Kerry, despite rain and fog, Tiernan easily won the Irish close championship.
The next summer, 1937, Clarrie Tiernan visited relatives in New Jersey, USA, and won the state championship there. By then she was recognised as the leading Irish woman golfer in the generation after the celebrated Janet Jackson, and was picked for the Great Britain Curtis Cup team in 1938, playing in Manchester, Massachusetts; she was the only visitor to win both her singles and foursome matches in that year, though the British and Irish team lost the series. Just afterwards, the GB Curtis Cup team met and defeated a Canadian team, and the following week Tiernan reached the final of the Canadian women’s open championship, in which she was only beaten on the last green after 36 holes.
Once the second world war started, there were fewer competitions in which she could develop her game, though (by then playing as Clarrie Reddan, having married Valentine Reddan, a Drogheda publican, in Dublin in the spring of 1940) she did win the Leinster Cup in 1944, defeating the young Philomena Garvey in the title match. Her Baltray clubmate was afterwards to become Reddan’s nemesis; in the first Irish championship after the war, in 1946, she and Garvey had a long-remembered confrontation in the final at Lahinch, decided in a playoff for Garvey, by a stymie on the 39th green. Garvey won all three of their subsequent championship encounters, in the semi-final in 1947, in the final in 1948, and in 1962 at Baltray. Despite these disappointments and despite eventually having a family of six children, Reddan still played at a high level, and her prowess continued. She won the Leinster championship several times, won the Leitrim Cup outright in 1953, and was picked for the Curtis Cup team in 1948, though the USA defeated the home team at Royal Birkdale that season. In 1949 she lost in the final of the British ladies’ amateur championship. She helped her club win the senior cup (1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1953, 1957, 1962 and 1965), and she won the Leinster senior championship in 1957.
Reddan was lady captain of the Co. Louth club in 1935 and 1946, and was president in 1987. Unusually, in that same year her daughter was ladies’ captain and her son Barry Reddan was men’s captain. In 1984 Clarrie Reddan was honoured by the Irish Golf Writers’ Association for distinguished services to the game of golf. Her involvement with golf and with Baltray continued throughout her long life, and she encouraged her children and wider family to share her enthusiasm and develop the same skills; Barry Reddan also played for Ireland in 1987. She died in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda on 11 June 2007, and was buried in Termonfeckin Old Graveyard, survived by two daughters and two sons.