The Life and Times of Mary Ann McCracken, 1770–1866 - Mary McNeill

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indebted to her for writing the new foreword. Also Sir Ronald Weatherup, who has written the new Introduction to this edition and who has, in his short time as President, shown much interest and support for the Society’s work.

      Thank you to Conor Graham and the Irish Academic Press for their belief in the project from the beginning and their continued support throughout this process.

      Lastly, I would like to acknowledge the contribution of all those at Belfast Charitable Society. The foresight and support of the Board and the work of Paula Reynolds (CEO) and all her staff have made this reprint a reality. I am pleased to have been part of this project working alongside all involved. We have produced a fitting tribute to two Belfast women who both strived to do their part in tackling the social issues of their respective times.

      David Watters

      Chair of Belfast Charitable Society

      First published in 1960, The Life and Times of Mary Ann McCracken is a biography written by one remarkable Belfast woman about another. The decade of the 1950s was a hopeful time in Belfast, much as it had been when Mary Ann McCracken was young in the 1790s. People were emerging from enduring wartime rationing and undoubtedly, the terrible experience of World War II and the blitz of Belfast had brought people together. They were the first generation to benefit from the welfare state and although there had been a rumbling IRA border campaign, it impacted little on Belfast and would soon terminate from lack of support.

      The 1780s and 1790s had likewise been a time for optimism. Belfast was leading the country in advanced social and political thinking, culminating in the formation of the Society of United Irishmen in the town in 1791. The young Mary Ann McCracken proved herself just as radical a thinker as them, holding her own in advanced political debate and associating with some of the most influential of the United Irishmen, including her own brother Henry Joy McCracken and the legendary Thomas Russell. Anti-slavery, the good of the common man, Catholic emancipation, improving the position of women, Irish music and language, the study of the natural world all occupied her and them as much as the enthusiasm for the French Revolution and advanced political reform for which they are better known. The real strength of Mary McNeill’s book is that she allowed Mary Ann to speak for herself through her extensive correspondence. Those letters provide a remarkable insight into a very special period in Belfast’s history and she lived long enough to pass them on to the nineteenth-century historian of the United Irishmen, R.R. Madden, and through him into the archives of Trinity College Dublin. They were a fundamental part of my own research into the 1790s, much as they have been to successive generations of historians.

      Mary Ann was born into a middle-class Presbyterian family which already had a reputation for civic leadership and reformist leanings. Her maternal grandfather, Francis Joy, founded the first Belfast newspaper, the Belfast News-Letter, in 1737, which was a channel for reformist opinion until it became an organ of government under new ownership after 1795. The Joys were also among some of the earliest members of the Belfast Charitable Society, founded in 1752, who designed and built Clifton House which opened in 1774 as Belfast’s first institution to care for the poor – a mission which it strongly maintains in regard to a wide range of social need today. Mary Ann was to continue involvement in its work until her death in 1866, aged 96. The McCrackens and Joys were pioneering textile manufacturers, laying the foundation of Belfast’s industrial heritage. Aged only 22, Mary was to set up her own muslin business with her sister, and with the other McCrackens was a noted philanthropic employer. She thought it an employer’s duty to create time for the workers to pursue leisure and education, and later created programmes for educating the female poor.

      It was this reputation as a friend of the poor which made Henry Joy McCracken a very unusual leader of the 1798 Rebellion. Working people, Protestant and Catholic alike, rallied to him even after that curse of modern Irish History, sectarianism, was tearing former allies apart and would soon infect Belfast’s future in a way that it had not done in the eighteenth century. The account of Mary Ann’s trek through the soldier and rebel-infested hills of Belfast in search of her brother after his defeat at the Battle of Antrim is only one example of the actions of this fearless young woman. And her correspondence during the imprisonment, trials and public executions of the two young men dearest to her, Henry Joy in 1798 and Thomas Russell in 1803, movingly describes the disintegration of the ideals and hope which had so marked preceding decades.

      Another remarkable Belfast woman and contemporary of Mary Ann’s – William Drennan’s sister, Martha McTier – commented after the bloodbath of 1798 and the sectarian reprisals which continued after it: ‘It will be long before this devoted country recovers’. Mary Ann’s nineteenth-century correspondence reflects that negative change. Here post-union Ulster is a much more restrictive society, particularly for women.

      It is easy to romanticise the 1790s – long seen as one of the great might-have-beens of Irish history. Even so, it is a period when Belfast was celebrated as Ireland’s capital of enlightened thinking and even today it commands interest and respect from people of very different political and religious leanings. There is something very symbolic in the Belfast Charitable Society reproducing this impressive book in its 267th anniversary year, for it has continued unbroken that philanthropic mission of the Joys, the McCrackens and the other Belfast reformers of the eighteenth century.

      Marianne Elliott

      September 2019

      Belfast Charitable Society

      This publication of Mary McNeill’s biography of Mary Ann McCracken has been promoted by the Belfast Charitable Society to renew interest in the life of an extraordinary woman. The book was first launched in the boardroom of the Society at Clifton House, Belfast on 10 October 1960. Mary Ann was an active member of the Society for many years in the early and mid-nineteenth century, as was Mary McNeill over one hundred years later.

      Mary McNeill

      First of all, a word about the author. Mary Alice McNeill was known as Molly and was born in Belfast on 21 August 1897. She was a pioneer in education and the interests of children as well as a supporter of the Society, of whom Mary Ann McCracken would have been proud. She was admitted as a student to St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, in 1916 to what was then an all-women college. The college had been founded in 1886 by Elizabeth Wordsworth, great-niece of the poet William Wordsworth. Back in Belfast she became a member of the Arellian Association, former pupils of Richmond Lodge School, which opened a nursery school for the children of the poor in Belfast in 1928, the Arellian Nursery.

      Later she became the secretary to the Committee for the Nursery School Association of Ireland.

      In 1943 she became a Children’s Guardian and would attend the Juvenile Court to act in the interests of the children. She was to become one of the first members of the Child Welfare Council and a member of the Board of Management of the Eastern Special Care Service.

      George McNeill, her father, was a member of the Board of the Society from 1910 until his death in 1945 and was Treasurer from 1922 to 1938. Following in the footsteps of her father, Ms McNeill served on the Board of the Society from 1945 to 1964.

      Further to the publication of this biography, she was awarded an honorary MA by Queens University Belfast in 1961 in recognition of her work as an independent scholar. On receiving the congratulations of the Society, she presented a photograph of Mary Ann to Clifton House on 24 July 1961, a photograph that remains on display.

      Ms McNeill’s resignation from the Board was received on 5 October 1964. The minutes of the next meeting refer to her departure as “a real blow to the Society, in the work of which and its history, Ms McNeill had taken an intense interest”.

      Mary Ann McCracken at Clifton House

      Mary Ann is described in the text as a “pioneer social reformer”. The extensive range of her activities included her concerns about poverty, education, working conditions, the status of women, slavery and the philanthropic work of the Society at Clifton House. In a letter written in October 1797 there appears what must have remained a guiding principle – “Is it not the duty of every person to promote the

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