Updated 22 August 2024: Just to highlight this blog post is still a work-in-progress, published early in draft form for my MA history project assessment. The post will be completed and re-published in the coming months. Thank you for your patience. Do please get in touch via the Comments section below or Contact me directly if you have any questions or comment about this topic in the meantime.
Archival research has long been central to the practice and process of creating a historical narrative. It's where historians have traditionally gone to find primary sources from the past, usually by searching a catalogue of those sources created by an archivist. Sometimes what you find is not what you expect. General curiosity about London's connections with Ireland prompted me to search The London Archives' online catalogue for all entries containing the word "Irish".
That led to a file titled "Irish Distressed Ladies Fund" which I automatically assumed was one of the many philanthropic ventures formed in London over the years in support of the poor in Ireland. But when I visited the archive and opened the file, it turned out to be something very different indeed. Something which provided a very unfamiliar perspective on the late nineteenth-century Land War in Ireland through the overlapping lenses of gender, class, religion and national identity.
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1880s: Land War in Ireland & "Irish Distressed Ladies"
In 1887, the London- and Dublin-based Irish Distressed Ladies Fund was founded "to assist a class particularly powerless to help themselves”. These were female members of Irish gentry landlord families who found themselves with reduced or no income as a result of rent strikes during the Land War in Ireland and were no longer able to live in the manner to which they had been accustomed..
"Whatever view may be taken of Irish politics at the present crisis, no one can impute blame in the slightest degree to those ladies and children, many of whom through the diminution in the value of land, have been reduced from affluence to poverty." - The Hospital, 31 March 1888 (London), Volume 3, Issue 79, p. 446.
An Irish Catholic landlord: Mary Power Lalor
The founder of the "Irish Distressed Ladies Fund" was Mary Power Lalor (née Ryan) of Long Orchard estate, Templetuohy near Thurles. She was an energetic philanthropist & an advocate of benevolent landlordism, the Union, and preservation of the social order.
As a proud, Catholic, Irishwoman, whose life was nevertheless securely anchored within the British imperial system, Power Lalor demonstrates that national identity in nineteenth-century Ireland was not always as polarised between ‘unionist’ and ‘nationalist’ as might be assumed". - Andrew G. Newby, “‘The Evils Which Have Arisen in My Country’: Mary Power Lalor and Active Female Landlordism during the Land Agitation”, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 10(1), 71-94.
A Depot for the sale of Distressed Irish Ladies' needlecraft
There are few people more helpless, as a class, than educated women, trained to no occupation, who are suddenly reduced to want. There is no blame attributable to them for that." - The Hospital, 31 March 1888 (London), Volume 3, Issue 79, p. 446.
"Those striving to maintain themselves are encouraged and helped in every way that it is possible to do so; articles made by them are received for sale on commission at the Depôts of the Charity; and in cases of great distress, the work is purchased and paid for at once. The Ladies are also employed to execute orders received at the Depôts for work of every description" - Report of London Executive Committee, November 1887-June 1889. London Metropolitan Archives Ref: A/FWA/C/D/167/001.
In May 1888, the Duke of Westminster made premises at 66 South Audley Street (on the Grosvenor estate in Mayfair) available to the Fund for the sale of needlecraft produced by "Irish Distressed Ladies". By 1891, the Depot had moved to 17 North Audley Street.
Looking at the history of South Audley Street on British History Online, it seems likely that the move was prompted by the “virtually complete reconstruction of commercial South Audley Street in shops with flats over" which started in 1880. We can still get a sense of what the original Depot would have looked like from the Georgian building which remains at 72 South Audley Street.
Closing reflection - coming soon
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