Kerry Girls (12 page)

Each girl also received a paper from the workhouse certifying her good conduct and unblemished moral character and a medical certificate showing she was of good health and had been vaccinated against smallpox.

While the Dingle Relief Committee was set up in 1845, the actual Dingle Union did not formally come into being until 22 February 1848. We know that the Dingle Peninsula was particularly badly affected by the Famine. Ventry, Ballyferriter and Castlegregory were blackspots on a par with Skibereen and Kilrush. We know from reports and letters to the
Kerry Evening Post
, in particular from 1847 onwards, that:

The state of the people in Dingle is horrifying. Fever, famine and dysentery are daily increasing, deaths from hunger are daily occurring. From all parts of the country they crowd into the town for relief and not a pound of meal to be had in the wretched town for any price.
19

Prior to 1848, Dingle was part of the Tralee Union. From January 1848 onwards the Poor Law Commissioners were taking seriously the problems in the Dingle Peninsula and had dispatched Capt. Hotham to report to them on the situation. Captain Hotham immediately proposed that Dingle Union be separated from Tralee and that a temporary workhouse be obtained with a view to erecting a permanent one. He also reported that ‘destitution in the distant divisions’ was increasing: ‘If we had a workhouse at Dingle, capable of holding 1,500, it would be filled in a day; but it is never worthwhile for this 1,500 to travel into Tralee for the chance of admission, to return again, if refused.’
20

On St Patrick’s Day 1849, it was recorded in the Minute Books that ‘9003 destitute persons were relieved out of the workhouse’,
21
and by 7 July 1849 that number had increased to 10,481 persons. By September of 1849, the problem of starvation was intensified by the number of famine-related diseases – cholera, smallpox, dysentery and typhus – being experienced with fever hospitals open in Dingle and Castlegregory. On 22 September the Board minuted a resolution ‘calling the attention of the Guardians to the overcrowded state of the workhouse, and its auxiliaries’.
22
Notwithstanding all the problems, a notice went out in the locality asking for tenders for the outfitting of the orphans – ‘Resolved that the Clerk be directed to advertise for 40 prs of shoes for the emigrants and for supplying the workhouse and its auxiliaries with mutton for 6 months.’
23
On 5 October we learn that James Sullivan ‘be declared contractor for supplying 40 pairs of shoes for the Emigrants at a 2s.9d. per pair according to the pattern sent in’,
24
and Frances A. Dunlevy got the contract for ‘conveyance of Emigrants to Dublin £20’. James Sullivan’s shoes were a bargain, as shoes cost 4
s
0
d
per pair in Kenmare at that time. All these preparations must have been very exciting for the girls who were selected to go. It is very unlikely that any of them would ever have worn shoes, and their clothes before they entered the workhouse were only rags, which neither covered them properly nor provided any protection from the elements. Underclothes were an unknown luxury.

Stating that the ship which is to convey the Emigrants selected from this Union is to leave Plymouth on 22nd inst and that it will be necessary that these parties should be in Dublin in time for the steamer which is to leave for Plymouth on the 20th inst.
25

While twenty girls were selected, and Poor Law Commissioners accounts state as such, it was in fact nineteen girls who left Dingle on the first leg of their journey to the North Wall, in Dublin and joined the Listowel girls there for the initial sea journey to Plymouth staying as their companions on the long voyage to Sydney.

Ships Register: Dingle Girls on
Thomas Arbuthnot

It was reported in the
London Illustrated News
:

A little colony of female immigrants from the Workhouses of Listowel, Ennis, Dingle and Ennistymon, left the North Wall, Dublin on Sunday for Plymouth, where they are to embark for Australia on a Government Transport. All these poor girls, upwards of one hundred, were comfortably attired and well equipped for the journey.
26

The Dingle Workhouse was not finished with the orphans, however. It appears that there were shortcuts taken in outfitting the girls and the Matron in Plymouth had to invest in further ‘necesseries’. Lieutenant Henry billed the Union for the outstanding amount and asked to remit same by postal order.
27

Kenmare Poor Law Union covered an area of 423 square miles. The Union was in a remote mountainous area with particular problems of its own. The population of the Union at the time of the Famine, as returned in the Minute Books, was 33,050 with a ‘sizeable proportion of these from off the Landsdowne Estate’.
28
The population of the Landsdowne Estate in 1841 within the Kenmare Union had been 16,695 with its absentee Landlord – Henry Petty Fitzmaurice, 3rd Marquess of Landsdowne – living in Bowood, his estate in Wiltshire. Fitzmaurice was a ‘strong champion of Catholic and Jewish emancipation, abolition of the slave trade, limited parliamentary reform and national education’.
29
However, his attitude to Ireland was ‘the diminution by every means possible of the Irish population, a harsh attitude to famine relief and the belief that the demand for fixity of tenure involved a plot …’
30

By early 1847 hunger was not the only affliction suffered in Kenmare. Fever was rampant in the district and particularly in the main workhouse and its auxiliaries. Dr Thomas Taylor, medical officer to the Kenmare Poor Law Union, wrote:

Our distress in this district is grave indeed … 100 die daily, painfully of Fever and Dysentery … which would not have the same force but for previous starvation. At the Poor House I attend daily 200 in the Epidemic. I am unassisted. More than 40 medical officers of the Union Work Houses have already perished of Fever caught in the discharge of their duties. Assuredly my turn cannot be very distant.
31

Dr Taylor forecast his own demise; he died of fever contracted in the workhouse in February 1848.

The Minutes of the Kenmare Union tell us that on Wednesday 28 August 1849:

Lt. Colonel Clarke, Poor Law Inspector accompanied by two Guardians, proceeded this day in accordance with instructions, to select a number of orphan girls between the ages of 14 and 18 years for the purpose of emigration to Australia. 41 were deemed eligible and await inspection of the Government Agent.
32

On that date there 217 ‘girls’ in the workhouse, which would have comprised all able-bodied females over the age of 15.

Life among the Kenmare girls was not always peaceful. Even though the forty-one girls who were deemed eligible were awaiting their ‘inspection’ by the Emigration Agent, we would expect that none of them were among the ‘disorderly women’ who created a disturbance in the dining hall on the morning of Wednesday 19 September. James Hickson JP and George Maybury, the workhouse doctor, held an ‘extraordinary session in the Sorters Hall at the request of the Vice-Guardians, when Mary Downing, Mary O’Sullivan Stretton, Abby Coughlan and Mary McCarthy were sentenced to one month’s imprisonment and hard labour in Tralee Gaol’ as a result.
33

By October 1849, Lieutenant Henry had been to Kenmare and made his selection:

Lieut Henry RN, Emigration Agent having selected 30 Females of whom 25 are to be fitted out for Emigration to Australia and to leave for Plymouth on 29 November, resolved that the forms of consent be affixed in the emigration of the persons therein and to the payment of a portion of the expenses of such emigrants. Cost of the funds of this Union to be now signed and forwarded to the Poor Law Commissioners.
34

The Kenmare Guardians were most efficient; on the same day they noted that they would advertise by handbill ‘inviting tenders for supplying the following articles for the outfit for the females selected for emigration to Australia’. ‘Tenders will also be received from Persons willing to contract for making the necessary articles of clothing.’ This simple sentence gives us a picture of the designated Kenmare ‘bell man’ going up and down Henry Street and Shelbourne Street, ringing his bell and giving out his handbills with its requirements for clothing for the orphans for any supplier who might be interested in quoting. And on 12 November the Board took a decision to award the contract to Murty Sullivan for the following:

However, the path of clothing the girls did not run smooth. There should have been able sewing women among the inmates of the workhouse, who would have run up the necessary outfits from the material supplied. Supplying the shoes caused a major problem. On the 17 November we note that:

Timothy Healy, having declined to furnish the shoes for the Emigrants in accordance with his tender for the same accepted by the Guardians on the 13th inst., the tender of Daniel Mahony to supply by the 24th inst., 50 pairs of Girls’ shoes at 4s.0d. per pair to be paid for on delivery, was accepted.
36

We should note here ‘to be paid on delivery’. Obviously the credit worthiness of the Union was in doubt among the local shopkeepers. This is reinforced by the story in
Realities of Irish Life,
written by William Steuart Trench (1808–1872), that in the winter of 1849–50, when the number receiving relief in the Kenmare Union were ‘somewhere about ten thousand’ he was called to a meeting of the Board, of which he was not then a member, to learn that ‘a contractor to whom a very large amount of money was due, had positively refused to give another sack of meal unless he received an instalment in cash that day’.
37
While Steuart Trench proposed that all present, including himself, put their hands in their pockets and subscribe and they would take the chance of the Union refunding later, he could not get any volunteers. He consulted with the government officer present and ascertained from him that ‘considering the numbers who are depending exclusively on this food, and who are already in the last stage of destitution’ that in excess of ‘twelve to fifteen hundred persons will be dead before twenty-four hours are over’.
38
As Lord Landsdowne’s agent, Steuart Trench was lucky that he had some funds available and was able to pay a portion of the debt and get the meal delivered.

However, the saga of the shoes and clothing continued. Two weeks later there is a note on the minutes: ‘A writ was served on the Clerk at the suit of Mrs. Ellen Healy of Kenmare for £420.14.0 with interest, due by the Guardians of the Kenmare Union for materials for clothing the Orphans.’
39
There is no explanation as to the cause for the writ, except Mrs Healy must have been trying to expedite payment of her account.

On the same day, 29 November, we are told ‘The following is a list of the female orphans sent from the workhouse on the 29th instant as emigrants to Australia. Their names and ages and distinguishing the electoral division to which the list of emigration is chargeable.’
40

Again the girls left Kenmare for Dublin initially, sailing out of Plymouth on the
John Knox
on 6 December and arriving in Sydney on 29 April 1850.