The Life and Times of Mary Ann McCracken, 1770–1866. Mary McNeill
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF
MARY ANN
McCRACKEN
Mary Alice McNeill (1897–1984) was born in Belfast and educated at Richmond Lodge and St Hugh’s College, Oxford. She lost a brother during the Great War and so returned to Ireland to work at a soldiers’ home. After graduating from Alexandra College Dublin, McNeill was assistant editor of the volume The Voice of Ireland (1923). Returning to Belfast in the mid-1920s, she became a member of the Arellian Association, which established a nursery school for the city’s poor children in 1928 – nearly 100 years after Mary Ann McCracken established a nursery school in the Poor House.
McNeill dedicated her life to numerous voluntary projects. She was Secretary for the Irish Christian Fellowship; Honorary Secretary for the Northern Committee of the Irish Association for Cultural, Economic and Social Relations (1938-53); Women’s Voluntary Services District Organiser in Belfast during the Second World War, advancing to Second Vice-Chairman of the Northern Ireland Branch, and she was nominated as a Children’s Guardian in 1943.
Following in the footsteps of her father and grandfather, McNeill served on the Board of the Belfast Charitable Society (1945–64). Working as an independent scholar, she published her first historical biography, The Life and Times of Mary Ann McCracken, in 1960. Having declined an MBE in 1953, McNeill went on to accept an Honorary M.A. from Queen’s University Belfast in 1961. She published two further biographies: Little Tom Drennan (1962) and Vere Foster (1971).
McNeill died on 25 October 1984, leaving a valuable collection of miniatures and silhouettes to the National Gallery of Ireland, and a significant bequest to the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University Belfast.
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF
MARY ANN
McCRACKEN
1770—1866
A BELFAST PANORAMA
MARY McNEILL
250th Anniversary Edition
First published by Allen Figgis & Co., Ltd., Dublin, 1960
Revised Edition published in 2019 by
Irish Academic Press
10 George’s Street
Newbridge
Co. Kildare
Ireland
© Mary McNeill, 1960, 2019
9781788550826 (Cloth)
9781788550833 (Kindle)
9781788550840 (Epub)
9781788550857 (PDF)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro 11/14 pt
Jacket front: Belfast Poor House, c.1785–90 (Nixon, John, c.1750–1818 © National Museums NI Collection Ulster Museum) and Mary Ann McCracken with her niece Maria, c.1801 (Bigger, F.J. © National Museums NI Collection Ulster Museum).
Jacket back: Williamson map of Belfast, 1791 (© National Museums NI Collection Ulster Museum).
Endpapers: Minutes of the Ladies Committee (MS1/2015/020/0040) © Belfast Charitable Society.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1. Francis Joy, 1697–1790
Chapter 2. Henry and Robert Joy, 1720–1785
Chapter 3. Captain and Mrs. McCracken, 1745–1770
Chapter 4. Childhood and Adolescence, 1770–1790
Chapter 5. The United Irishmen, 1783–1791
Chapter 6. The Revival of Irish Music, 1792
Chapter 7. Reform or Revolution, 1791–1795
Chapter 8. Kilmainham Part I, 1795–
Chapter 9. Kilmainham Part II, –1797
Chapter 10. Antrim, 1798
Chapter 11. Thomas Russell, 1798–1803
Chapter 12. Interlude, 1803–1810
Chapter 13. The Turning Point, 1810–1827
Chapter 14. The Ladies’ Committee, 1827–1851
Chapter 15. The Last Years, 1851–1866
Bibliography
Abbreviations
Endnotes
Index
Family Tree of the Joy and McCracken Families
Map redrawn from the 1st edition (1960).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
At the outset, I would like to thank the family of the author, Mary Alice McNeill, for permission to republish this seminal biography. Without their continued support, this republication would not have been possible.
The text remains largely unaltered from the original, but work was required to update the original footnotes due to re-cataloguing of archives since Mary McNeill undertook her research in the 1950s. In particular, special thanks is due to Cathryn McWilliams for her work on the references related to the holdings of the Public Record Office Northern Ireland and Trinity College Dublin as well as the Joy-McCracken family tree; to the Archive and Heritage Development Officer at Clifton House for updating the references for material from the Belfast Charitable Society Archive; Teresa Flanagan for proofreading the original transcript; and to National Museums Northern Ireland for permission to reproduce images from its collections.
I am grateful to the past and present Presidents of the Society. Lady Moyra Quigley, for her continual support and for introducing the Charitable Society to the esteemed historian, Marianne Elliot. Marianne will be familiar to