Our heritage is a surprising mix of female entrepreneurship and pragmatism …
If you order a Bushmills or a Lockes at the bar, bring home an impossibly soft throw from Foxford Woollen Mills, spend the weekend in Hunter’s Hotel in Newrath Bridge, or down a pint in the Brazen Head, you’ve chosen a business that was run, as far back as the 19th century, by a woman. There are brilliant women in all our family histories, and tangible traces in towns and cities all over Ireland, in brands and buildings through which women in business left their mark.
Even the grande dame of Dublin hotels, the Shelbourne, overlooking the beautifully landscaped gardens of St Stephen’s Green, once had a woman in charge: Margaret Cotton Jury. Suddenly widowed in 1872, eight years before the Green was restored by Lord Ardilaun to public use, Jury inherited the recently rebuilt hotel from her husband William.
Just last year, Hodges Figgis republished (in a pretty clothbound limited edition) Elizabeth Bowen’s entertaining biography of the Shelbourne. The book places Margaret Cotton Jury, head to toe in black lace, at the foot of the hotel’s still-lovely staircase, ready to greet travellers fresh from the Kingstown steamer or the train at Westland Row. Already the hotel had a rich history and a celebrity guest list. In 1842 William Makepeace Thackeray wasn’t overly thrilled by his queer little room, but was mightily impressed by breakfast (copious), lunch (perpetual), and dinner (plentiful). In 1867 Charles Dickens stayed there, and found himself as he put it, splendidly housed. But Margaret Jury’s bread and butter came in the shape of the families who stayed for the season, attending sporting and social events, with all their great expectations, feverish excitements and crushing disappointments.
Her guests spent days hunting and racing, threw lavish dinners in the hotel’s private rooms, and decorated their daughters for evenings spent in the silks-and-scents press of the Castle.
Margaret Jury’s home was at Airfield in Dundrum, Co Dublin (later the home of the Overend sisters) where today much of the farm, gardens and house are now open to the public. She attended to business at the Shelbourne daily, and brought a regular supply of fresh Airfield produce for use in the hotel kitchens. Margaret Jury’s knowledge of the hotel business stemmed in the first instance from growing up observing her father, hotelier Stephen Cotton, at work. As Elizabeth Bowen remarked, Margaret “knew the hotel business from A to Z, being equally able to steer policy and bring attention to the minutest detail”.
Margaret’s son Charles, who succeeded her, also had the benefit of growing up at close quarters to a business, and an understanding of that essential balance between the overview and the particular, and all the other ins and outs of the hotel trade. When Margaret died aged 83 in 1904, she left a whopping estate of nearly £60,000. The Shelbourne itself passed to Charles, and still welcomes guests today.
Mary Sims’ extraordinary success in outfitting the rich and famous brought her riches and fame of her own.
Near the hotel, dotted around Grafton Street, Dawson Street and Molesworth Street, were the smart Dublin dressmakers. Their queen, Mary Sims, was described more than once as the Worth of Dublin. Worth had a lot to answer for, given that he is supposed to have come up with both the bustle and the hoop skirt, but it was a public compliment of the highest kind. Sims’s premises at 51 and 51a Dawson Street (now home to Marco Pierre White and Toni & Guy) made a perfect location for a court milliner, dressmaker, and artificial florist. Princess Louise, daughter of the Prince and Princess of Wales, granddaughter to Queen Victoria, was so taken with Sims’s work that she returned to her again and again, including when she needed evening dresses for her wedding trousseau. The modiste never tired of mentioning her royal connection, to the shivering thrill of lesser customers.
But Sims didn’t just make frou-frou dresses for a Castle crowd dazzled by her proximity to royalty. In 1886, she worked from sketches made by the curator of the Royal Irish Academy, her learned opposite neighbour on Dawson Street, to bring into being a dress for the Vicereine, Lady Aberdeen. Based on Daniel Maclise’s painting “The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife”, and illustrations from the Book of Kells, it was a gleaming illusion of gold cloth created by gold embroidery on a cream poplin ground, stitched by women at the Irish School of Art Needlework. A Tara-esque brooch fastened the embroidered mantle, a fibula brooch set off the gold shoulder-piece. The effect was completed with bouquets of thistles, shamrocks and roses, the whole thing a mobile representation of the Celtic revival, displayed on the body of the viceregal consort. Cultural appropriation by the coloniser, or a visual endorsement of Ishbel Aberdeen’s support for Home Rule? Dress was political.
Newspaper correspondents analysing who wore what when made sure to drop Mrs Sims’s name into their columns, and long after her death in 1897 her business continued to produce Sims-branded dresses. She left her husband an estate of £34,000, equivalent to several million today, an impressive accumulation at a time when a dressmaker’s average annual earnings were about £450.
Not every woman was a raging success. Businesswomen who struggled sometimes had to watch as things fell apart, and for the unluckiest this meant losing everything and being adjudicated bankrupt. With this on the horizon many women sought to keep some control by petitioning for their own bankruptcy, while others were casualties of impatient creditors who pulled the trigger on the bankruptcy process. Sometimes an adjudication of bankruptcy was unjust.
Ursula Radcliffe certainly believed hers was. She had sunk all her savings, plus some top-up loans, into a tobacconist shop in Belfast. The profits turned out to be far below from what she had been given to believe, but she worked every hour available, trying to break even, at least, and when she couldn’t manage that she did her best to satisfy her creditors, closed everything up, and found a job in England. Appalled to be declared bankrupt, she appealed the adjudication. The Lord Chancellor (then Ireland’s highestranking judge, in the Court of Appeal) Ignatius O’Brien upheld her appeal, and went out of his way to praise Radcliffe, who was, in his words, scrupulously honest and singularly careful.
Ignatius O’Brien was a Corkman, the ninth child of a chandler and brewer’s agent. But his father proved a poor businessman, and O’Brien’s mother stepped into the breach to provide as well as possible for her large family. As a young man, O’Brien had had to leave his university course under financial strain, and ended up working as a news reporter and studying part-time for the Bar. He had an intimate understanding of economic pressure and hard-working women, and brought all this experience, indivisible from himself, to the Bench.
Ursula Radcliffe’s case was decided on assessment of the facts and application of the law, but surely at some level the memory of his mother’s labour stirred in the Lord Chancellor’s subconscious as he reviewed the evidence of Radcliffe’s relentless 74-hour working weeks, spending next to nothing on herself, determined to make the business pay if at all possible.
Most women just worked hard, head down, day in, day out, to keep things afloat in their small, locally focused businesses.
But the humblest of businesses could have an impact on people’s everyday lives. Financial services, housing and healthcare were daily concerns. On the money front, pawnbrokers’ shops, many of which were run by women, offered essential moneylending services for anyone who was female, or poor, or otherwise marginalised and less likely to be in a position to access banking services. Meanwhile, in housing, in the first years of the 20th century, 2.5 per cent of the population lived in boarding houses. Two-thirds of those boarders were men, but 94 per cent of boarding house keepers were women.
In the late 19th century, Eliza Jane Bell, widowed in her 20s, inherited her husband’s shop, Butler’s Medical Hall. Under Bell’s stewardship, which was to last for a full half-century, the medical hall was transformed into a modern retail chemist’s shop, designed with alluring displays of cosmetics and scents as well as the more workaday prescription counter. In a move that was both practical and progressive, Bell was also listed in an Irish Times advertisement as early as 1904 as a stockist of Southall’s sanitary towels, “for the convenience of ladies”, at sixpence for a six-pack. Most girls and women were still making and laundering their own pads from recycled cotton or linen. But now, if you had a little money to spare, you could pick up a packet of pads as you went about your day-to-day errands, in welcoming, female-friendly environments like Butler’s Medical Hall.
A number of neighbouring businesses also sold the towels, like Mrs Dunckley’s shop, thoroughly modern with its ready-made costumes and the latest shapes in corsetry, and Mrs Lambe’s, stocked with a useful supply of servants’ capes and aprons. The sanitary towels were a liberating convenience, made readily accessible to Irish women thanks to Mrs Bell, Mrs Dunckley and Mrs Lambe.
The passing on of skills and understanding both to and from women recurs again and again.
Mary Anne Locke was the daughter of a distiller, which left her well fitted to take over the Brusna Distillery when her husband John Locke died. Her sons later followed her into the distillery. Kathleen Clarke (née Daly) was the daughter of a dressmaker, Catherine Daly (née O’Mara), who had run a business with her sister, Kathleen’s Aunt Lollie. Kathleen not only opened her own hugely successful dressmaking business in Cecil Street, Limerick, when still a teenager, but she also later went into business with her husband Tom (Clarke) in America, and then in Dublin where their tobacconist shops famously facilitated the operation of Republican spy rings.
Skills transfer within families benefited hundreds of women with businesses far less well-known than the Shelbourne, Locke’s, or Clarke’s. Mary Bigham, a pawnbroker in Enniskillen, followed her father’s trade; Ellen Jane Gilchrist and her mother Jane Moore were both pawnbrokers, and went into partnership; in Clifton, Elizabeth Millar learned hatting from her father. You could fill pages with them.
Growing up with a built-in understanding of a trade, whether you learned it from one of your parents or someone else, gave anyone the edge. And for us, it helps to illustrate how women in business – and working women of all kinds – influenced the texture of society. Because no matter how often it was preached from the pulpit, thundered in the House of Commons (Isaac Buttstyle) or murmured with side-eye in the street that a woman’s place was in the home, the daily examples children saw made for the strongest lesson of all. Even national school reading books – or at least the girls’ ones – tried to muscle in. They expressly promoted the idea of the primacy of a woman in a domestic setting, whether sitting quietly in her own home, or working her fingers to the bone in someone else’s.
Girls knew, without even leaving the classroom, that there were alternative lives for women.
Even in 1870, 40 per cent of national school teachers were women, so all the pupils had to do was raise their eyes to the top of the schoolroom and chances were they would land on a woman earning her own living and making her life outside the home. They didn’t have to look much further afield to realise that women were welcoming guests into shops, hotels, and pubs, offering collateralised loans at the pawnbroker’s shop, selling pouches of tobacco and advertising sanitary towels for sale.
Understanding, as they did, that there were women active in business doesn’t change what we know about Irish society having been hierarchical, patriarchal, full of all kinds of rhetoric and idealism about a woman’s role, and fundamentally designed to prefer men. Nor does it mean that all women had to do was lean in and suck it up. Far from it. But it does complicate what we already know, this extra layering of understanding of the ubiquity of female business owners. All our personal histories contain them. These women were our great-grandmothers, our great-grand-aunts. They employed, housed, and trained people, their commercial premises shaped our streetscapes, their businesses fed the economy. Which of them lives in your history?
The Commercial Lives of Irish Women, 1850-1922, Business As Usual (Liverpool University Press) is out now.
