From Ballinrobe workhouse to Australia and back

AUSTRALIA has become a second home for the Irish. In the past year alone, hundreds of Mayo’s best and brightest have made the journey Down Under in search of better employment, adventure and sunshine. They are greeted by thousands of expats. Face-to-face contact with Mam and Dad is but a Zoom or a Facetime away. The journey home might be thousands of miles long, but thanks to modern aviation, it is doable.

It wasn’t always this way.

Earl Grey Scheme

Throughout the 19th century, Irish flowed into Australia through voluntary emigration or enforced transportation. As a result, over 2 million Australians now claim Irish ancestry.

On October 6 in 1849, 26 girls left Ballinrobe workhouse bound for this great country. These were among 126 Mayo girls that emigrated to Australia between 1848 and 1850 under the Earl Grey Scheme.

Named after the then British Secretary for the Colonies, the scheme saw 4,114 orphan girls transported from Ireland to Australia. Difficult as that journey must have been, the Earl Grey scheme offered an escape from the pits of hell itself.

The cost of the journey was borne by the colony, and the benefits to the British Empire were two-fold. Firstly, it reduced the burden on the horrendously overcrowded workhouses. Secondly, it supplied young, working-age women to a country that was short of workers and disproportionately male.

While on board, the orphans were minded by a surgeon and a matron who kept them away from the grasps of frisky sailors. Many were given shoes, clean clothes and meat for the first time in their miserable lives. As a result of this care, less than 1 percent of the Earl Grey orphans perished along the voyage (in stark contrast to the coffin shops that were travelling to America).

These orphans left Ireland with nothing to their names. Their parents were dead, their prospects were non-existent in a country plagued by colonial oppression and ravaged by a catastrophic famine.

In 1847 the Mayo Constitution described Ballinrobe workhouse as being ‘in a most awfully deplorable state’. In just one week in April 1849, 96 people perished within its abysmal, disease-ravaged walls. Along with hundreds more, their bodies were flung into shallow graves at the very edge of the sprawling workhouse complex.

“Once they went out into the workhouse, they often only came out again in a coffin. So selection for Australia was very much a matter of life and death,” said Brendan Graham.

Graham, who has researched the story of the Ballinrobe orphan girls extensively and composed the song ‘Orphan Girl’, was speaking at an event at Ballinrobe organised by local historian Averil Staunton to welcome home one of the town’s long-lost daughters, a descendant of those young women sent to the other side of the world.

 Lyn Nash during a moment of personal reflection at Ballinrobe workhouse (Pic: Trish Forde)

Touching the past

When 19-year-old Catherine Joyce and 18-year-old Ann Honor Solan reached Sydney Harbour on January 12, 1850, they knew they’d never see the door of Ballinrobe workhouse again.

Incredibly, Sydney woman Lyn Nash laid her hand upon that very door on June 23, 173 years later – the door her ancestors Catherine and Ann passed through when Ireland was on its knees.

Lyn came here to honour the memory of Catherine, her great-great-great-grandmother, and Ann, who was married her great-great-grandfather’s Thomas Chester, who later starter another family from whom Lyn is descended. Like many other Australians, Lyn knew nothing of how her ancestors made it to the continent. Then her cousin Jenny Chester began researching the family tree, uncovering the names of Catherine Joyce and Ann Honor Solan, whom she traced back to Ballinrobe.

Speaking to The Mayo News during her visit to the town, Lyn explained:  “We knew that she [Catherine] was an orphan, and that information was available in our archives, but I wanted, for the purpose of the story, to understand about where she came from. Why did this happen? What was happening in Ireland at the time, and what was happening in Ballinrobe at the time?” 

In 2017, Lyn contacted Ballinrobe Writers’ Group, the members of which have been a driving force behind the efforts to commemorate those who lived, died and suffered in Ballinrobe workhouse. The reply from Averil Staunton came swiftly, and connections were quickly formed.

Those connections are what led Lyn to finally retrace her ancestors’ terrible lonely journey back to Ballinrobe, where she was given a ‘céad míle fáilte’ by Ballinrobe Writers’ Group.

‘A once in a lifetime opportunity’ is how Lyn sums it up when asked why she chose to travel so far to see the workhouse, a place that wasn’t spoken about for years after it closed.

“It’s just important, I think, to honour that [the orphans’ journey] and to touch the places and feel them and identify them and get that human story,” said Lyn.

‘Intense’

Part of the day’s itinerary involved a tour of the old workhouse reception building. Now used as a commercial premises, this is the place that Averil Staunton described as ‘the saddest building of all’.

It was here that husbands, wives, parents and children saw the very last of each other. From once they walked through the door, boys, girls, women and men were permanently segregated into four separate quarters.

Those who joined Lyn at the present-day workhouse were given another talk by Averil Staunton. The harrowing details she described were met by Lyn with incredulous, dismayed head shakes.

The visitor from Australia also took a moment of private reflection inside the empty, echoey room where male inmates would have seen the last of the outside world.

Asked what it was like to stand alone inside a building that had once echoed with wails of unspeakable grief, she said it was very emotional.

“I’m tearing up now just thinking about it, because it just echoes the ghosts, the bones here, it’s a very intense experience. To just connect at that very kind of human level, it’s just very intense and a great honour,” she explained. “I really appreciate everyone being available today, offering their little tokens of remembrance for the girls.”

The day ended with a prayer for the hundreds buried beneath the feet of all who gathered to pay their respects, to remember those who died an undignified death in what was known as ‘the most hated institution in Ireland’.

Twenty-six orphan girls avoided that fate the day they left Ballinrobe for Australia, where they, to quote Lyn, ‘died of old age…with their families nearby, loved and cherished’.

The orphans girls who went to Australia from Ballinrobe workhouse under the Earl Grey Scheme were:

Catherine Joyce (19 years), Ann Honor Solan (18 years, Hollymount), Bridget (Biddy) McDonough (16 years, Robeen), Briget Conry (18 years, Kilcommon), Winifred (19 years) and Judy Crean (15 years) (sisters, Partry), Mary Duddy (19 years), Catherine Ferris (18 years), Anne Flynn (16 years), Mary Gallagher (16 years, near Partry), Sarah Gill (15 years), Bridget Hamrouge (16 years), Mary (18 years) and Nancy (17 years) Heally (sisters, Lackaun, The Neale), Bridget Heffernan (Heferan) (16 years), Nancy (17) and Catherine Horan (16) (sisters), Sarah Houghegan (16 years, Robeen), Ellen Kenny (16 years, Robeen), Bridget McCormack (14 years), Mary McGillick (18 years, Cloncare, Robeen), Bridget Reilly (18 years, Hollymount), Honora Sheridan (16 years), Bridget Walsh/Welsh (16 years, Ballinrobe), Peggy Welsh/Walsh (18 years, The Neale) and Winifred Walsh (19 years, Ballinrobe). 

May they rest in peace.