MacManus, Emily Elvira Primrose (1886–1978), matron of Guy's Hospital, London, was born 18 April 1886 in Wandsworth, south London, the daughter of Leonard Strong MacManus (d. 1911), a doctor, and his wife Julia Emily (née Boyd). Leonard MacManus was from a catholic gentry family with an estate in Co. Mayo. He trained at Dr Steevens' Hospital in Dublin, and became a much-loved doctor and borough councillor in Battersea, London, but spent as much time as possible at his family home in Mayo at Killeadan House. He insisted that his two sons and two daughters be brought up to think of themselves as Irish, and wanted them to be country children, rather than Londoners. His sister Charlotte Elizabeth MacManus (1853–1944) was active in the Gaelic League and wrote novels, and he was related to the writer Leonard A. G. Strong (qv). His wife, Julia MacManus, was a daughter of Robert Macrory Boyd, manager of Jameson's distillery, and had grown up in Howth House, Co. Dublin. Emily's cousin Cecil Anderson Boyd (1875–1942) was an Irish rugby international and a doctor who won the MC in 1918 serving in the RAMC.
Emily was the eldest child; she was rather ineptly educated by a governess and in two private schools. As a teenager, she lived for three years as companion to her aunt, Lady Perry (née Caroline MacManus), wife of Sir Edwin Cooper Perry (1856–1938), a surgeon and distinguished medical administrator who was superintendent of Guy's Hospital (1897–1920). During her time with Lady Perry, Emily learned to drive a steam car, a notoriously difficult machine. Her sister was training to be a radiographer, and a brother became a fashionable doctor in London; Emily decided she wanted a career in nursing. A year young, she successfully got through the interview in Guy's Hospital, and started a two-months' trial as a student nurse in Guy's in May 1908. Nurses' training at the time was (to modern eyes) almost unbelievably demanding, and life in hospital nurses' home, such as that at Guy's, very regimented, but she completed the training and then, from 1912, studied midwifery at the East End Mothers' Home, a place which would have been an education in itself for most young women of her background. MacManus, however, had already seen many aspects of urban poverty, helping in her father's practice.
Further valuable experience was gained in a year spent as a sister in a male medical ward in Kasr El Aini Hospital, Cairo, and a short time as a private nurse elsewhere in Egypt. With war threatening, she returned to Europe and worked in Guy's, training junior nurses, but in 1915 joined up as a Civil Nursing Reserve sister. She worked throughout the war in northern France, helping to establish field hospitals and nursing desperately injured men, especially at Étaples, a vast camp where there could be up to 22,000 patients. Her last posting was in a casualty clearing station at Noyon, just behind the front lines, where conditions were appalling; she was affected by mustard gas emanating from the uniforms of the men she was attending, and had to sleep in bloody and vomit-stained bedding. Reminiscences of war experiences published in her autobiography, Matron of Guy's (1956; 1958), are a valuable record of conditions in army hospitals of the time. She noted that she found it difficult to return to civilian life after the excitement and camaraderie of war, and especially missed year-round life under canvas. MacManus, who had transferred to Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service (Reserve), was twice mentioned in dispatches.
She came back to Guy's as assistant matron. In 1922 she left to work on a year-long dietary experiment on the boys in the Garden City orphanage established by the charity set up by Dr Thomas John Barnardo (qv), and then in 1923 took up the post of matron in Bristol Royal Infirmary. MacManus's four years there were enlivened by a medical colleague, who asked for her help in treating zoo animals; a baby elephant was cured of boils, and a lion cub survived pneumonia. Though she was enjoying her time in Bristol, when she was asked in 1927 to apply for the post of matron in Guy's Hospital, MacManus did not hesitate; the post was perhaps the most challenging and prestigious in British nursing, and her loyalty to the traditions embodied in Guy's was an important element in her character and attitudes.
As well as running many aspects of the work of a hugely complex institution, responsible over the years for thousands of patients and hundreds of nurses, MacManus was also involved in the politics of her profession, aware of the importance of training and organisation for nurses. For several years she was a member of council of the Royal College of Nursing, which she had helped to found in 1916 (as the College of Nursing), and served as its president (1942–4). She was also a member of the General Nursing Council, a member of council of the Queen's District Nursing Association (both in the United Kingdom and Ireland), chairman of the voluntary advisory nursing board of HM Prisons (1936–46), and a delegate to international nursing congresses. After her retirement, she travelled on missions to the British West Indies, Persia (Iran), Turkey and Holland, reporting on nursing services. She published a number of articles in nursing periodicals, and wrote a book, Hospital administration for women (1934; revised second edition, 1949).
The second world war brought still further challenges. Guy's Hospital suffered in bombing raids, particularly in 1941 when a whole wing was destroyed, and was evacuated out of London. MacManus, serving as 'sector matron' (1939–46), was effectively matron of all hospitals in south-east England, when there were unprecedented civilian and military casualties to be dealt with in extremely difficult conditions. In 1946 she retired from her post in Guy's, and returned to live in Ireland, to a small house, Terry Lodge, that she had had built near Pontoon, Co. Mayo, where she had been spending her holidays since 1933. She gardened, fished, kept bees and goats, and was still to some extent in the public eye; she gave newspaper and radio interviews about her experiences, and was very well known in Mayo. On BBC radio in 1964 she broadcast a series for children, Mary and her furry friends. In 1966 she was the castaway on BBC radio's Desert island discs. Her autobiography, Matron of Guy's, appeared in 1956; there was a reprint that same year, and a second edition in 1958. It is full of interest, attractively written, and illustrated with her own photographs.
MacManus was awarded the OBE in 1930 and the CBE in 1947. She decided to stay in Mayo, even though she could have been looked after in her old age by Guy's, and she died, unmarried, in the Sacred Heart Hospital in Castlebar on 22 February 1978. She was buried in the graveyard beside St Michael's church, Ardnaree. An unusual last request recalls her love for the Mayo countryside: she asked that locks of her hair be cut off and entwined in bushes round Killeadan, so that birds could use it in lining their nests.
Her brother Dermot or Diarmuid MacManus predeceased her, in April 1975. After serving in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, and suffering serious injury at Gallipoli, he was invalided out of the army and came to study astronomy at TCD in 1919, but gave up the course to join the IRA. His military knowledge was important to the IRA in the war of independence, and during the civil war he was at one time commandant-general in the Free State army. He was a close friend of W. B. Yeats (qv) (introducing him in 1933 to Eoin O'Duffy (qv)). Diarmuid MacManus wrote articles on military matters and letters to newspapers from his home in Mayo, and also published two works on Irish fairies, ghosts and other folklore. In September 1922 he married Kathleen Thompson, daughter of Sir William Henry Thompson (qv) and granddaughter of Peter Redfern (qv).