From fashion icon to humanitarian heroine

The 19th-century aristocrat Lady Hester Catherine Sligo of Westport House was something of a celebrity in her day. She partied with monarchs, moved in the highest circles and even had a fan base – one Dublin gallery was selling copies of her portrait to a curious public in 1836.

But now an exhibition of previously unpublished letters from the 1840s casts her in a new light and reveals a woman who was keenly aware of contemporary politics and deeply concerned for her Co Mayo tenants as the Famine unfolded in 1845.

Her letters and other related artefacts are on display at Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University of Hamden, Connecticut, and will, it is hoped, travel to Ireland. The institute’s founding director and Famine scholar Prof Christine Kinealy says they give a remarkable insight into the life of the elite and the role of women in the mid 19th-century Ireland.

“This is a wonderful collection from a woman of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy who is taking control of one of the big houses,” she said. “History always focuses on the men, but Hester Catherine Browne’s letters show her to be a person of great personality and one who was always concerned for her tenants.”

Prof Kinealy, whose own family is from Co Mayo, was the first person to read the letters after the university acquired them from Kenny’s Bookshop in Galway five years ago.

Lady Hester Catherine Sligo emerges as a humane landlady who, along with her tenants, fell on hard times during the Famine. In 1847, high taxes forced the family to close Westport House, move into a small house in town and get rid of their carriage to save money.

Despite that, the family still tried to help their tenants. Lady Sligo’s eldest son had inherited the estate two years previously, but he was still guided by his mother. At one point, she said she was very proud of him because he was so good to the tenants. He kept the workhouse open with his own money and he and one of his cousins paid to have a ship with food come into Mayo to feed the starving people.

Lady Sligo’s awareness of the world around her was not new. In 1816, she married the owner of Westport House, the second Marquess of Sligo, Howe Peter Browne, to become Lady Sligo and the couple campaigned to abolish slavery in Jamaica when Browne was appointed governor there in 1834.

The couple went on to have 14 children and they continued to push for reform and modernisation when they returned to Ireland.

When her husband had a debilitating stroke in the 1840s, the family moved to Tunbridge Wells in England and, from there, Lady Sligo took over the day-to-day running of the estate. She moved to Clontarf, Dublin, when her husband died in 1845 and wrote regularly to her agent in Westport, George Hildebrand, before eventually moving back to west.

On September 20th, 1845, she wrote: “I am sorry to say there is in this country a blight on the potatoes, which has caused the stems to turn black, & wither – I believe it was caused by a frosty night we had a fortnight ago. It has occasioned a rise in the price of potatoes here, which shows there is some anxiety on the subject . . . Let me know whether the potato crop in Mayo is affected?”

She also asks Hildebrand to buy blankets for the tenants and to make sure that they are of good quality.

“She was very involved in a practical way,” explains Prof Kinealy. That practicality extended to what was grown on the estate. In one dispatch, she sent a high-yielding strawberry plant to Westport in the hope that a similar crop could be grown there.

Her letters provide an insight into her persona as a fashion icon too. In one letter dated July 19th, 1845, she asks that a selection of silk and satin gowns and three or four of her “largest and showiest” fans be sent by coach to Dublin. And yet, in December 1849, the family helped run a charity bazaar in what is now the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin to raise money for the people affected by the Famine.

Like Maria Edgeworth, Lady Sligo also made appeals to the women of Australia, Britain and America to help the tenants in a county that was one of the hardest hit.

Meanwhile, back in Mayo, the Browne family still runs Westport House. Lady Sligo’s great-great-great granddaughter Lady Sheelyn Browne said she is delighted to finally see one of the marchionesses being focused on and there are hopes that the exhibition will come to Mayo next year.