My grandmother Bridget McNally was born on St Patrick’s Day 1900 in a one-room cottage alongside the railway in Adavoyle. (1901 Census: House No. 91, Adavoyle townland, Jonesborough DED, Co Armagh). Her father Thomas had built his little house against the gable wall of his parents’ home and over the next few years as the family grew, he built a second room. But when she was eight, Thomas died during a fairly routine operation in the Meath Hospital, Dublin, and his wife Lizzie, thirty years old, was left with five children. The background to the hiring fair and people putting their children into indentured service was sheer, utter desperation. Lizzie’s in-laws were next door, sharing a street and a roofline but not much else – but one gathers there was little solidarity or even sympathy on offer. We know that she walked along the railway line all the way to Faughart Hill to work tying corn on the McDowell farm. Six km there and 6km back and 10 hours tying corn for whatever day labouring rate she could get.
When I first looked at the 1911 Census (House No. 76, Aghadavoyle townland, Jonesborough DED)I could find the family but Bridget wasn’t there on 2nd April when Constable John Cunningham arrived to count heads. I told my late mother and she said: “Try Mulholland’s on the Oul Road in Dromintee” (House No. 68, Drumintee townland, Jonesborough DED). There she was: Bridget McNally, just turned 11 and already a year’s hiring behind her. Schooling was compulsory until the age of 10 and the Constable noted she could read and write. In Donegal, children as young as seven were being hired, no matter about the Schools Act. I believe Newry Fair at least discouraged hiring under 12 years of age, but younger children were being hired through informal networks and extended families for even less money than was on offer at the Fair. She was listed as “Niece”, a common device for hiring very young girls.The Mulhollands were in fact related, but that was no guarantee of better treatment. Bridget told me she was put to cleaning out the byre. She went looking for the wheelbarrow but there was none. She said: “They gave me a priddy basket, I had to fill it with the graip and drag the dung out and across the road to the dunghill.”
A year later and Bridget was old enough for Newry Fair, held in May and November in Market Square at the bottom of High St, where the big farmers from “down the country” hired workers; “down the country” meant anywhere north of Newry, “away down the country” was north of Banbridge or Markethill. A newspaper notice in 1904 listed the pay rates for six-month terms:
‘Ploughman £10; Farm Hands £9; Strong Hands £6; Little Fellows for light work £4.5; Strong Young Women with general knowledge £7-£8; Young General house servants £6-£7; little girls £4-£4.10.
Some comments in the historical journals suggest these rates are at the high end and there was no widely known tariff rate at all in Newry Hiring Fair. But the pay was certainly much better “down the country”: around home, rates as low as 30 shillings were known. According to the Poyntzpass Historical Journal there were large numbers from around Slieve Gullion hired between Markethill and Tandragee and around Scarva. After each fair there were so many young people from around here heading “down the country” that they filled special third-class railway carriages out of Edward St station.
Bridget had a protector of sorts in her brother Francie, two years older, who usually contrived to get them hired on farms close to each other. She told us she was hired for a few seasons “down the country” – she mentioned Poyntzpass and working in fields close to the railway.
At some point over the next years we gather Francie got worried about Bridget and one Sunday when he had time off work, he walked the railway tracks all the way back to Adavoyle to tell his mother: “Take Bridget out of it.” Francie would have been keenly aware of the price to be paid – no money at all for her six-month hire period – so she must have been at some serious risk and Lizzie took her out. We know no more of this: of course it could have been the work or accommodation or the food or just about any kind of cruelty you care to imagine, but sexual assaults by farmers’ sons or other farm-workers on serving girls were not exactly rare – and you only have to listen to your folk songs to know their fate. Victorian newspapers in Britain and Ireland were full of stories of serving girls hanged for infanticide. The Hiring Fair was part of a society and economy organised like a great pyramid with rigid, vicious class barriers often reinforced by sectarian differences, and with open contempt for what were known as “the lower orders.” And even in the lower orders, as Bridget put it, tuppence ha’penny looked down on tuppence. Young girls from poor rural homes, half domestic servant and half farm labourer, were at the very, very bottom, of low value and ultimately disposable.
Bridget came back from the hiring with great knowledge of farming methods and with a skill in handling animals which few men in our area could match. She constantly studied the cattle to see if they were moving and grazing normally, and restricted the diet of the horse. They said she was better than the Vit.
When she was 18 the matchmaker came a-calling. My understanding is that Tommy Morgan from Down the Pad in Dernaroy came in to Lizzie, probably put a bottle of whiskey on the table and said: “I have Wee Joe McNally standing at the head of the loanan and he’s come for Bridget.”
Wee Joe was a 37-year-old widower whose wife and child had died in childbirth two years earlier – he and Tommy were Hibernians connected to the new hall on the Adavoyle Road. Tommy would have listed the benefits: Joe had seven acres in Dernaroy and Foughill and a two-room slated house with a dirt floor, and maybe the clincher: if Bridget McNally married Joe McNally she would have the cure of the whooping cough.
Lizzie came down to Bridget below in the room and said: “It’s up to you daughter, and only you.” Bridget replied: “I’ll take him if it means I don’t have to go back to the hiring.” There was no room for romance on the Fair Green and there wasn’t much Happy Ever After.
They married in 1918, and the following February her son John was born. She lost him in September 1921 under the wheels of a Crossley Tender of the Special Constabulary, at her own front gate in Dernaroy on what is now Finnegans Road. The driver was Constable John Richardson of Bessbrook. He didn’t stop. He told the inquest he had been off the drink for some months.
Granny Bridget loomed large over our childhood. Her home was a warm haven of love and griddle bread and currant buns and extraordinary freedom from rules of any kind. She was wise and we listened to her. She told great stories – but she never told us about the Hiring. That had to be dragged out of her.