Assisted emigration: workhouse and landlord passage

Assisted emigration landlord schemes in Ireland worked alongside a separate, state-backed route: landlords who paid to send tenants abroad in order to clear estates they could no longer support, and Poor Law unions that borrowed against the local rates to send workhouse inmates, mostly young women, to Australia and North America. Both were entirely legal after 1847. Neither felt much like a free choice to the people put on the ships.

The two routes are often folded together in family memory as simply “sent out,” but they had different sponsors, different destinations, and different paperwork. Understanding which one applied to a given family, and why, is one of the more useful things a researcher can pin down, especially since a landlord’s ledger and a union’s minute book survive in different archives and rarely cross-reference each other.

How Irish law allowed assisted emigration

The Irish Poor Law Act of 1838 divided the country into unions, each with a workhouse funded by a local poor rate and run by an elected board of guardians. From the start, guardians had limited power to spend rate money helping paupers who had been resident in the workhouse to emigrate, funded through a rate not exceeding one shilling in the pound.

The Irish Poor Law Extension Act, which received royal assent on 8 June 1847, widened the system considerably. It shifted the full cost of relief onto Irish property, and it extended eligibility for outdoor relief, delivered outside the workhouse walls, to the old, the sick, orphans, and widows with two or more legitimate children. A further Act in 1849 let boards of guardians apply to the Poor Law Commissioners to borrow money specifically to pay for the passage of anyone who had already spent at least a year in the workhouse.

That borrowing power is what made workhouse-funded emigration possible at scale from 1849 onward. It also meant a union’s debt for a ship ticket sat on the rates for years afterward, which is one reason guardians were selective about who they sent, favouring the young and reasonably fit over the old or the sick.

Crown estates, land held directly by the state rather than by a private landlord, ran their own smaller version of the same logic. Two Crown estates in County Galway assisted 253 tenants to Quebec in June 1848, followed by a further 158 not long after, and the Crown estate at Kingwilliamstown in County Cork sent 119 tenants to New York in 1849, with 72 more following. The mechanism was the same as a private landlord’s scheme: a lump sum for passage, judged cheaper than continuing to support the same people at home.

Assisted emigration landlord schemes: clearance dressed as help

Landlords ran their own emigration schemes outside the Poor Law entirely, usually because moving tenants off the land was cheaper than paying the poor rate to support them, or cheaper than the rents they were failing to collect.

The best documented, and most notorious, is Major Denis Mahon’s scheme from his Strokestown Park estate in County Roscommon. In 1847, with roughly 12,000 tenants on an indebted estate, Mahon organised the emigration of 1,490 people from 274 families to Quebec, travelling out through Liverpool on ships including the Virginius, the Naomi, the Erin’s Queen and the John Nunn. More than half the passengers aboard the Virginius died of shipboard fever before the vessel reached Quebec. Mahon himself was shot dead in his carriage on 2 November 1847, the most prominent Irish landlord killed during the Famine years.

Further north, Sir Robert Gore-Booth of Lissadell sent about 500 tenants to Saint John, New Brunswick, aboard the Aeolus in 1847. A second voyage of the same ship carried 428 people from the neighbouring Palmerston estate, arriving on 1 November 1847. Local officials in New Brunswick described the new arrivals as impoverished, hungry, and in some cases even naked, and predicted that nearly all of them would need public charity to survive the winter. Other Palmerston tenants sailed that April on the Carrick of Whitehaven, which wrecked off Cap des Rosiers on the Quebec coast; 133 people died and 48 survived.

Not every landlord scheme ran during the worst famine years. On the Lansdowne estate around Kenmare in County Kerry, the agent William Steuart Trench organised the emigration of roughly 3,500 people off the relief rolls between the winter of 1849 and 1850, at an estimated cost of £13,000 to £14,000 against an initial £8,000 grant from Lord Lansdowne. Groups of around 200 left Cork each week, bound for Boston, New York, New Orleans or Quebec, and by the scheme’s end the local workhouse held only 50 or 60 remaining paupers.

Smaller schemes followed the same pattern into the 1850s. William Denny of the Denny estate near Tralee paid for the passage of local workhouse inmates in 1851, with the cost recovered later from the board of guardians. Nicholas Donovan, a Tralee landowner and co-owner of the emigrant ship Jeanie Johnston, ran a similar workhouse-funded scheme the same year, though it drew criticism at the time for favouring his own tenants over other applicants. In April 1853, the Earl of Kenmare sent 65 tenants from his Killarney estate out on the Jeanie Johnston. Taken together, historians estimate that landlords assisted the emigration of up to 100,000 people between 1846 and 1855, against roughly 20,000 sent by workhouses over the same years. A Mayo newspaper writer, looking back in 1864, put a rough figure on how lopsided that funding split felt locally, estimating that no more than 5 per cent of the county’s emigrants over the preceding years had paid their own passage.

Landlord passage and workhouse passage were not the same ticket

The two routes suited different people for different reasons, and a family’s papers usually show which one applied. A landlord scheme paid for whole households at once, arrears and all, and existed because a landlord wanted land cleared of tenants, not because the tenants had asked to go. A workhouse passage, by contrast, was aimed at individuals already inside the system, most often unmarried women under twenty, and required a formal application, a medical check and a signature.

Families who avoided both routes and paid their own way, whether through savings, a relative’s remittance or the sale of stock, left a different kind of paper trail again, closer to what how a famine family raised passage money sets out. Whichever route got a family aboard, the crossing itself carried the same risks, described in more detail in coffin ships in Black 47.

The workhouse route: young women and Mayo’s numbers

Early in 1848, the Poor Law commissioners in Ireland circulated every board of guardians asking whether young women aged fourteen to eighteen in their workhouse were willing and fit to be sent to Australia. Guardians who agreed provided an outfit of clothing, arranged a medical inspection, and had the girl and several guardians sign a consent form before she travelled on to Plymouth for the crossing. Between 1848 and 1850 the scheme moved more than 4,000 young women out of Irish workhouses, drawn from well over 100 unions around the country.

County Mayo had five unions, based at Ballina, Ballinrobe, Castlebar, Swinford and Westport. In 1848, only Ballina took part, sending 47 girls to Australia on two ships, the Lady Kennaway to Melbourne and the Inchinnan to Sydney. The following year, four of the five Mayo unions sent girls: 40 from Ballina, 25 from Ballinrobe, 15 from Castlebar and 10 from Westport. In total, 137 girls left Mayo’s workhouses under the scheme, a small fraction of the more than 4,000 sent nationally, but a meaningful share of the young women passing through those particular workhouse doors.

Ballina’s own workhouse gives a sense of what the girls were leaving, and its own conditions in the famine’s worst year are set out in more detail in Black 47 in Mayo: the Ballina workhouse. Built to hold 1,200 people, it was recorded at points holding around 1,400, with 1,138 deaths inside its walls during the worst famine years. Against that backdrop, a paid berth to Melbourne or Sydney, however uncertain, was not a hard sell to guardians looking to reduce numbers on the rates, or necessarily to the girls themselves.

The scheme wound down in 1850. Funding for further passages became harder to secure, and some colonial officials in Australia had grown openly critical of how the young emigrants were selected and prepared, which cooled official enthusiasm for continuing it at the same scale. Later in the century, workhouses kept sending smaller numbers abroad: a further 25,000 or so departed under Poor Law arrangements in the second half of the century, and separate philanthropic schemes run by Foster and Tuke added roughly 30,000 more assisted passages outside the Poor Law system entirely.

What historians cannot know

Landlord-scheme passenger lists were often compiled quickly, by parish rather than by full name, and many recorded deaths at sea or in the fever sheds at Grosse Île were never matched back to the ship they had sailed on. That makes it far easier to state how many people left a given estate than to say what became of them afterward, or how many survived their first winter.

Workhouse minute books that would confirm exact emigration numbers for every union have not all survived intact, particularly for smaller unions in the 1848 season before record-keeping settled into a more consistent pattern. Where a figure like Mayo’s 137 girls can be checked against surviving guardians’ minutes and shipping records, it holds up well. Where no such record survives, only an estimate is possible, and it should be treated as one.

Consent is harder still to read backward. A signed form from a workhouse girl, or a tenant’s name on a landlord’s passenger list, tells a researcher that a person travelled, not what they felt about the choice in front of them, or how much choice a starving household actually had. The documents record departures. They rarely record the conversation that preceded one.

Assisted emigration landlord schemes therefore leave a paper record that is best at counting people and worst at explaining them, which is exactly why the surviving personal letters from the period, where they exist, carry so much weight against the official numbers.

Sources and further reading

• The National Archives of Ireland, Poor Law Records research guide
• “Irish Poor Law Extension Act 1847,” legislative record, Parliament of the United Kingdom
• Irish Genealogical Projects (IGP) Archive, Kerry, “Lansdowne’s Estate in Kenmare Assisted Emigration Plan”
• Sligo Heritage, “Gore-Booth, Lissadell and Sligo Famine Emigration”
• University of Notre Dame, breac, “Migration, Mobility, and Murder: The Story of the 1,490 Assisted Immigrants, from the Mahon Estate, Strokestown, County Roscommon, 1847”
• Mayo County Library and mayo-ireland.ie, workhouse and Famine Orphan Emigration Scheme records for Ballina, Ballinrobe, Castlebar and Westport unions