Siobhan McHugh's Orphans of the Famine (Weekend, August 28th) about the shipment to Australia in the 1840s of some 5,000 Irish girls, most of them orphans, made moving reading.
In the context of the memorial at Melbourne to the girls who disembarked there in December, 1848, mention is made of The Lady Kennaway, the ship which carried them.
The Lady Kennaway, which had made earlier voyages to Australia with immigrants, made what turned out to be her last voyage in 1857, again with Irish girls, but not to Australia. This final voyage, virtually unknown or forgotten in Ireland, was to South Africa, and deserves to be recalled if only because of its relatively happy and successful conclusion.
The choice of South Africa for some 150 Irish girls was an unlikely result of the unexpected end of the Crimean War in 1856.
This war had been going so badly for England that she had been forced to recruit reinforcements for the Crimea in Germany, and 8,000 men in what was titled The British German Legion were on the point of embarking for the Crimea when the war abruptly ended.
Faced with the problem of what to do with the Legionaries, the British government, conscious of a more or less permanent shortage of men for its army in South Africa, offered attractive terms to any Legionaries willing to serve on the Eastern Cape, a perennial troublespot.
Some 2,000 accepted, and disembarked at East London, the Eastern Cape's main port, early in 1857.
Sir George Grey, Governor of the Cape, while grateful for the unexpected reinforcements, was simultaneously concerned that the absolute lack of marriageable women on the Eastern Cape must lead to what he termed "great immorality", given that 2,000 of the Legionaries were single men in their early 20s. He therefore asked London, as a matter of urgency, to remedy the position, and in June 1857 heard as follows from Henry Labouchere, the Colonial Secretary:
"I am forwarding out to East London a party of single females of good character from Ireland, and yesterday engaged the ship The Lady Kennaway, which will carry about 250 adults. She is to be ready to sail in midAugust, before which time there is no reason to doubt we shall be able to fill her."
In the event, Mr Labouchers had considerable difficulty in obtaining sufficient single girls of the right age and class from among the ordinary working population and, after what he termed "much trouble and uncertainty", about 100 young women were eventually selected from among the inmates of four or five of the principal union workhouses.
Nine Irish and 12 English families were also selected; Mr Henry Lannigan, a graduate of Dublin's Royal College of Surgeons, appointed surgeon-superintendent; and The Lady Kennaway, with a total of 231 passengers, sailed from Plymouth on September 5th, 1857, on its 7,000 mile voyage to the Cape.
The passenger list shows the 153 Irish girls as natives of 18 counties, the eldest 30, the youngest 17 years of age. All, without exception, give their occupation as "servant".
A few facts about the Kennaway itself might be appropriate at this point. A former tea clipper, she was 115' long, 30' wide, with 6' 6" headroom between decks, and weighed 583 tons. For every passenger aboard her this effectively meant sharing an area less than the size of a tennis court with 230 other passengers for two and a half months.
No account of the voyage is extant so it's not known if the Kennaway called at either of the traditional ports of call, Madeira or the Cape Verde Islands, but the Eastern Cape's main newspaper, the resonantly-titled King Williamstown Gazette and Border Intelligencer reported on November 20th that "The Lady Kennaway, with the Irish immigrants aboard arrived safely at East London yesterday, all aboard, including an infant born at sea, being well. Of the immigrants themselves we have heard nothing but good reports: they are said to be a very respectable body of persons."
The correspondent for the other Cape newspaper, the Grahamstown Journal, chose to write of the Kennaway's arrival in a jocose, pseudo-romantic style reminiscent of Punch at its unfunniest:
"In a place like King Williamstown, where the nobler sex, in a state of single blessedness is rampant, the entre of several score of lovely damsels from Erin's Isle was not to be effected sub-rosa.
"Men of family like myself were therefore not at all surprised when they detected amative bachelors pursuing stealthily their enquiries as to the anticipated day and hour of the immigrants' arrival here.
"But I confess I was a little taken aback at the antics of many of Her Majesty's loyal servants on Sunday afternoon. The excitement produced among the staid 45th was particularly strong: they displayed it in a great number of ways, two actually indulging in the unseemly sport of running a race in full regimentals.
"The girls themselves take great pleasure in noticing these proofs of welcome, and by their affability have won golden opinions from swains of all classes .. ."
THE reality, as might perhaps be expected, was neither jocose nor romantic. As little had been done to construct a harbour at East London, passengers had to be taken ashore in surf boats, a task that took nearly four days. Two days later the Kennaway dragged her anchor in a gale, went aground and became a total wreck.
The two months' notice of the Kennaway's arrival had given the Eastern Cape's Administrators ample opportunity to make arrangements for the accommodation and transport of the Irish immigrants, and to set out by way of a formal notice signed by the Eastern Cape's Chief Commissioner, John Maclean, the conditions that would attach to the employment of the girls.
Whatever the problems that doubtless attended the transport, welfare and employment of 153 girls straight from a 77-day voyage on a small sailing ship, it's reasonably safe to assume that conditions were at least an improvement on those that prevailed in the "hiring room" at Hyde Park Barracks of Sydney, described at the time as "resembling a meat market".
On November 25th the girls left for King Williams Town, the capital, a 12-hour journey by mule wagons, but not before one girl had accepted a proposal of marriage from an East London police constable.
On November 27th hiring commenced, and continued for a week, during which 80 girls were employed in King Williams Town at an average wage of 30 shillings per month. The remaining girls found employment either in neighbouring villages or at Grahamstown.
Only some 17 married Legionaries: many of their great-grandchildren probably live comfortably today in the solid, Germanic-sounding towns - Berlin, Frankfort, Potsdam, Hanover - that are a feature of the Eastern Cape.
The Kennaway and her Irish passengers have an unlikely memorial in the shape of the multi-storey Kennaway Hotel which today overlooks the sea at East London. Prominent in the Hotel's foyer are a print of the Kennaway and a mural of the landing of her 153 Irish passengers, both of which caught my eye during an overnight stop a couple of years ago and prompted a little reading and research .. .
Of one Kennaway girl only do we know something of her marriage, which is touched on by her great-grandson in his aptly-titled autobiography, Asking for Trouble. The girl is Mary Warren of Dublin, her great-grandson Donald Woods, editor of the East London Daily Dispatch, and a leading anti-apartheid campaigner whose eventual dramatic escape from South Africa was the subject of Richard Attenborough's film Cry Freedom.
"Great-grandmother Warren," says Woods, "was one of the Kennaway girls brought to South Africa to provide wives for German Legionaries, but after her arrival fell in love with an Irishman named Kelly. She was 15, he was 42, and for some years after he married her he was still buying dolls for her." Kelly's belief as to her age is probably nearer the truth than the 18 noted on the Kennaway's passenger list.
One of her daughters, Alice, Donald Woods's grandmother, had, he says, "handsome Irish features, and many years later, when I paid my first visit to Ireland I saw counterparts of her, and of my mother, in the features of the women in a Tipperary marketplace." Between us and the other Kennaway girls time and distance have drawn a veil. All that can be safely assumed is that, like Mary Warren, they settled, married, and had children; and that all now lie somewhere a long way south of any Irish marketplace.