The thirty seven Listowel girls who left Kerry for Australia as part the Earl Grey ‘Orphan’ Scheme did not all emigrate together and though the arrival in Sydney of both groups was only five months apart, they ended up having very different experiences.
Thomas Arbuthnot
Initially nineteen Listowel girls left on the Thomas Arbuthnot from Plymouth, in the company of one hundred and eighty nine other Irish famine ‘orphans’ including their fellow Kerry girls form Dingle.
These were the lucky ones as they had the humane and caring Surgeon Charles Strutt on board their ship for the voyage. On arrival it was decided by the colonial government to send one hundred and thirty of the girls into the interior where there were a growing number of settlements and stations, who would no doubt require labour. At least eight of the Listowel girls and nine of the Dingle girls went on this journey. Charles Strutt, while waiting for a return passage to England, had volunteered to see these girls into employment. Three matrons (one was Miss Collins, who had been an assistant matron in Listowel Workhouse) accompanied the party on fourteen drays drawn by a team of horses. They were only two days on the road – a rutted track, the forerunner of what is now the Hume Highway – when disaster struck and two of the Listowel girls Mary Brandon and Mary Conway were thrown off their dray and the wheel went over their legs. Strutt had no option to but to leave them at Camden but he put them in the care of an Italian priest before journeying on. Both survived this ordeal, were apprenticed and married in the district. Strutt was very careful to only place the girls in good employment with responsible employers. By the time he had arrived at journeys end, he had ‘placed’ all the girls and to make certain that they were looked after, he called on the return journey to their new homes and if he judged them un-satisfactory, he had no problem in moving them on to better situation.
Tippoo Saib
The Tippoo Saib was the last ship that left Plymouth to bring orphans’ to Sydney under the Earl Grey Scheme. By the time that these twenty Listowel girls were cleared to go to Australia, conditions had changed dramatically there. Animosity had built up towards the scheme. There was an inherent anti-Irish, anti-female and anti-Catholic prejudice in the colony at that time. The ‘orphans’ were denounced as ‘immoral, useless and untrained domestic servants, a drain upon the public purse a financial liability’. The Irish ‘orphans’ were branded as ‘useless trollops’.
This criticism was in the main unfair. They were untrained and this was probably the principal shortcoming of the entire scheme. By 1850 Australia was settling into respectability, it was no longer a convict colony. In particular, residents in the towns saw themselves as replicating the way of life they had left ‘at home’ in England. They were advertising for Parlour Maids, Piano Teachers, ‘a Governess competent to teach French and Music besides every other branch of a solid education’
The Kerry girls, fresh out of Irish Workhouse had absolutely no experience in housekeeping, dairying, or the finer points of educating children. Taking into account the disadvantages of their level of service experience, was the outcry in the Australian newspapers justified or was there a deeper political agenda at work in which the girls were unwitting pawns?
Full details of The Kerry Girls from Dingle, Kenmare, Killarney & Listowel.
Available in good bookshops or online from The History Press Ireland, The Book Depository, Amazon,
good work as always Kay
Trevor, thank you. This is gold dust indeed. I am really appreciative to get approval from such an important authority on the entire Earl Grey Scheme. Trevor – Author of Barefoot & Pregnant, listed on Amazon.com as Best Books of 2014.http://www.amazon.com/Barefoot-pregnant-Australia-documents-register/dp/0949672254
Kay I thought I’d included some family reconstitutions of your Kerry girls on my blog. There’s a couple in post 11 this one… http://wp.me/p4SlVj-gb Cathy Kennedy from Killarney and Mary Casey from Listowel. You may have seen them already.
I wonder if i have more best wishes
trevor
Trevor, thank you very much for this. I must have missed it although I ‘signed’ up for your blog so I am getting it directly now. It is great that you are doing these reconstitutions as we in Ireland would not have access to the relevant records to enable us to get this information. My job here is to try and locate the baptismal certificates of the girls. and even hopefully get some descendant but that last bit is wishful thinking. I found Mary Casey though- she was a native of Duagh (a few miles from Listowel) and I have a copy of her baptismal certificate – 1 October 1833. Her father was Timothy Casey and her mother was Ellen Heffernan.
There is something unusual though with Cathy Kennedy. None of the Killarney girls went on the Thomas Arbuthnot.They went on the Elgin to Adelaide and none of their names were recorded at this end or indeed in Adelaide. There is a full list of ALL the girls who arrived there on the Elgin and I have been able to identify some of their baptisms but not that many. Any more information on Cathy Kennedy would be good.
Kay. I am very interested in your article on the Listowel girls.Over the last four years I have been researching Catherine Sullivan as part of a history of the Washington Family. She was one of the girls on the Tippoo Saib. I managed to get the Minutes of the girls selection and names from the very helpful Kerry Archives. A smallp part of my research is on the orphans database. Coincidentally her future parents-in-law, who also settled on the Macleay River travelled on The Thomas Arbuthnot.
Judy, glad you found the article on The Kerry Girls: Emigration & the Earl Grey Scheme of interest. At the time I was researching it, I checked minutely for baptism/birth records for each girl as I thought it very important for every girl to have a ‘personality’ of her own – not just to be one of the Earl Grey Orphans. I found a number of girls called Mary Sullivan with parents Denis and Mary – in Lixnaw and Moyvane – who would have qualified for Listowel Workhouse but I could not say definitively that one of these records was for Catherine. My research showed as is quite normal that the girls had no idea of their real age so you could not go by what they declared as their age on arrival. I would advise that you have a look on http://www.IrishGenealogy.ie putting in location as ‘Kerry’ with baptismal date from 1820 – 1835 with parent Denis Sullivan and see what comes up. Pay particular attention to the Sponsors. Here is where you might get a clue to a relative or someone associated with the Sullivan family that you know.