Meet the woman at centre of one of Rose of Tralee's greatest mysteries
Crowned The By Was Claire Now 1972 Claire Schmid Goes Who Dubendorfer, Rose Of Tralee Furrer,
The woman at the centre of one of the longest unsolved mysteries of the Rose of Tralee competition has played down the “mystery” surrounding her whereabouts.
Little was known about what happened to Swiss national Claire Dübendorfer after she was crowned the 1972 Rose of Tralee.
As a result, a mystery grew around her, especially as one of the last people to see her in Tralee was someone who saw her being driven away from the town on the back of a motorbike.
She is now 74 and the former winner goes by Claire Schmid Furrer. Now married, and a grandmother, Mrs Schmid has returned to Tralee and is one of at least 25 winning roses attending this year’s festival.
She told the : “There is a certain amount of truth about what has been said. But I am not so sure about it being a big mystery.
”When I won, there wasn’t social media or the immediacy of phones like there is today. It is so long since I won that it is a bit of a blur.
”But I did attend the party after I won, so it's not true that I walked off the stage and left town. Then I would have stayed with my mother in her bed and breakfast.
”We did a bit of sightseeing and then we left for the airport and flew back to Switzerland.”
As far as the motorbike was concerned, she does vaguely remember being driven around on it, possibly when she did a tour of the Ring of Kerry with her friend, Marcus. Although he has been described as her boyfriend, she says he was just a friend.
As for reports of him following the rose bus around on his motorbike, she said she can’t remember that and said it was “unlikely”.
Part of the mystery stems from failed attempts to contact her. Invites for the 25th anniversary of the contest in 1984, for example, were sent to her last known address in her native Switzerland but later returned as "person unknown".
Despite attempts by other winning roses over the years, nobody had been able to track her down. So little was known about her that she merited little more than 100 words in what is regarded as the definitive history of the contest.
June Carey, who helped compile the information for Ryle Dwyer’s , said the mystery over her whereabouts was — up until recently — “the biggest mystery of the contest”.
Nobody appeared to even know what her Irish heritage was, as she would have needed a family link to qualify for entry into the contest. She has now said that her link with Ireland is through her mother Margaret Hanna, who was from Dublin and was an orphan.
Discussing the failed efforts to contact her, Ms Schmid Furrer said: “This was a time long before social media and instant messaging. It was a time of letters.
"I taught textiles for a long time, and I had a fashion fabric business for a long time. So, there was a lot of things going on."
She added: ”I had a partner who died of cancer 30 years ago this month, and that was a difficult time. Also, in the early days, there really wasn’t much of an effort as there is today to get hold of past Roses.”
She is now in touch with a lot more Roses and is also in a WhatsApp group set up by several rose winners and fellow contestants.
She said that she hopes one of her six grandchildren — Yamira — will one day be a rose for Switzerland.
She is aged six now, and is her son Jeremias’ daughter, and she has an Irish passport. ”It would be great,” she said. "I would love her to be a rose when she reaches 18."