The Irish Distressed Ladies' Fund: Audley Street, London W1
- N16Breda
- Jun 12
- 8 min read
Archival research has long been central to the practice and process of creating a historical narrative. It's where historians often go 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 had 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 Ireland's poor and peasant populations.
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 Ireland's late nineteenth-century Land War through the overlapping lenses of gender, class, religion and national identity.
Updated 12 June 2025 : This blog post was originally published 22 August 2024 in draft form as part of my MA Public History dissertation submission.
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1880s: Ireland's Land War & Irish ladies' financial distress
In 1887, Mary Power Lalor née Ryan (1880-1913), an Irish Catholic landlord of Long Orchard estate, Templetuohy Co. Tipperary, set up the 'Irish Distressed Ladies' Fund'. Its purpose was "to assist a class particularly powerless to help themselves" - women of the landed class who were no longer able to live in the manner to which they had been accustomed. This is an unfamiliar aspect of Ireland's Land War which, alongside the Home Rule campaign for restoration of a devolved parliament in Dublin, dominated Anglo-Irish politics of the 1880s.
Widespread agricultural distress in Ireland during 1879-1880 had fuelled tenant farmers' opposition to landlordism and a demand for land reform. The National Land League (Conradh na Talún), a mass movement founded by Michael Davitt with Charles Stewart Parnell MP as its president, coordinated demands for the "Three Fs": fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale of the right of occupancy.
The Land War campaign of 1879-1882 involved civil disturbance, boycotting, agrarian violence and, crucially, a massive rent strike. This loss of rental income impacted some members of the Irish landed class more than others, in particular those women reliant for their personal income on financial returns from their families' landed estates.
In 1881, an 'Association for the Relief of Ladies in Distress Through Non-Payment of Rent in Ireland' was consequently set up in Ireland to support widows and unmarried women of the landed gentry with reduced or no income as a result of the rent strike.
The catalyst for Mary Power-Lalor setting up the separate 'Irish Distressed Ladies' Fund' in 1887 was the revival of the Land War following the failure of the first Home Rule Bill in 1886 and the return of agrarian distress to Ireland.
From 1886, the 'Plan of Campaign' was using rent strikes as a form of collective bargaining on landed estates in an effort to secure rent reductions from individual landlords. By the end of 1887, the two organisations focused on the Irish ladies of the gentry who found themselves in financial distress as a result had merged into one.
From then on, Mary Power Lalor's 'Irish Distressed Ladies' Fund' operated through a Central Committee in London, with Executive Committees in London and Dublin. In Dublin, up to twenty ladies at risk of entering the workhouse could be accommodated in what became known as the Power Lalor Home at 34 Rutland Square (renamed Parnell Square in 1933) and, later, at 38 Mountjoy Square.
"Whatever view may be taken of Irish politics at the present crisis....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
Competing narratives of Land War distress
Historian Andrew Newby's research into the life and work of Mary Power Lalor highlights how the 'Irish Distressed Ladies' Fund' provided a mechanism for British and Irish conservatives and unionists to present an alternative view of the privileged landed class in Irish society.
This alternative view was deployed as a counter-narrative to that of Irish nationalists and their supporters in Britain and Ireland for whom the Land War was a justifiable act of resistance to the abuses of Irish landlordism. These abuses were exemplified by the violence of tenant evictions. Publications like the Illustrated London News circulated graphic images from 'The Rent War' alongside reporting which emphasised that "the county sheriff, the bailiffs, and the police, [were] coming legally to take possession of the tenements of defaulting tenants".
An Irish Catholic landlord: Mary Power Lalor
Mary Power Lalor was a devout Catholic and an impressive philanthropist who was instrumental in protecting children in Donegal from the risk of localised famine in the early 1880s. She was also an advocate of benevolent landlordism, the Union of Great Britain and Ireland, and preservation of what she viewed as the natural social order in the relationship between landlord and tenant.
Andrew Newby's detailed biographical account of Mary Power Lalor and the Irish Distressed Ladies Fund contextualises her dedication to improving the condition of the Irish poor through work rather than charity alone and strengthening Ireland's economic resilience against the risk of famine through the development of local industry, including female-dominated crafts like lace-making.
"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 (2020), pp. 71-94.
London Depots for the sale of Distressed Irish Ladies' needlecraft
Mary Power Lalor's belief in the relief of financial distress through self-help applied to Irish women of the gentry and peasantry alike. To that end, shops were established in the cities of Dublin (34 Rutland Square (renamed Parnell Square in 1933), Cork (76 Grand Parade) and London for the display and sale of decorative needlework and clothes made by those distressed ladies supported by the Fund.
"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" - London Executive Committee Report, Nov 1887 - June 1889. (London Archives Ref: A/FWA/C/D/167/001).
The extent of aristocratic support for the Irish Distressed Ladies Fund is evident in the prestigious Mayfair addresses from which the London Work Depot operated over the years.
The first Depot was opened in May 1888 at 66 South Audley Street in premises provided by the Duke of Westminster who owned (and still owns) a large part of Mayfair. It subsequently moved to 17 North Audley Street (1891), 411 Oxford Street (1901), 7A Lower Grosvenor Place (1908), and 24 Lower Grosvenor Place (by 1919).
Financial support for the Irish Distressed Ladies Fund was already in decline by the 1890s but the London Depot was still advertising the Irish distressed ladies' wares for sale up until at least 1919. Even in 1932, the London branch of the Fund was included in the list of charitable organisations in receipt of donations from the Queen. It was not until 1948 that Mary Power Lalor's creation was wound up, following the death of the last inmate of Dublin's Power Lalor Home in 1947.
Months after first discovering the records of the Irish Distressed Ladies' Fund in the London Archives, I still find Mary Power Lalor a fascinating historical figure. She seems to embody a set of contradictions which complicate any respresentation of Ireland's Land War as a straightforward tale of plucky Irish peasants resisting predatory English landlords. I often wonder how Irish people of different backgrounds viewed the London shops selling the handiwork of 'Irish distressed ladies' during the years dominated by Ireland's journey from the Land War of the 1880s through to the War of Independence, Civil War and, finally, partition and creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. If anyone knows anything more about this topic, I'd love to hear about it.
Blog sources & further resources
Irish women activists during the Land War
Andrew Newby's paper appears to be the only detailed study of the philanthropic activities of Mary Power Lalor
Margaret Ward's paper on the Ladies' Land League and the work of activists like Anna Parnell provides an interesting point of comparison with Mary Power Lalor
Heather Laird's book chapter explores how women 'participated in the Land War as political subjects' and the ways in which that challenges the conventional narrative
Understanding Ireland's Land War
The National Library of Ireland has made many images with no known copyright restrictions available on Flickr Commons.
The 'Evictions' album contains a set of photographs which powerfully evoke how evictions and the Land War played out in 1880s Ireland.
Comments on the images often provide additional context about the subjects in the photographs - like Honoria, Annie, and Sarah O'Halloran who actively defended the family home from the bailiffs and police alongside their parents and brothers.
You can see a collection of contemporaneous reports of the 1880s Land War from the Illustrated London News on the Victorian Web .
Scroll down this page Ireland in the Illustrated London News until you reach the heading 'The Rent and Land War'.
Historian Terence Dooley (author of Burning the Big House: the story of the Irish country house in a time of war and revolution) has written a useful overview of Ireland's land ownership and Irish landed estates
Maeve O'Riordain uses the lens of gender to examine the landed families that typified those impacted by the rent strikes of the Land War
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