Between 1849 and 1851, the Earl Grey Scheme took girls, aged from 14 to 19, from workhouses across Ireland to work in Australia as servants and to help populate the new colony. In that time, 4,114 young Irish girls from the 32 counties were transported to Australia, writes Anne Delaney

 

If, like me, you’re fond of a ‘cuppa’, the name Earl Grey will probably ring a bell, for Earl Grey tea is one of the world’s best-known black teas. A distinctive feature of this tea is that it is imbued with oil of bergamot – an oil produced from the rind of the bergamot orange. This gives Earl Grey tea its characteristic tart flavour.

Earl Grey tea has long been associated with Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, who was Prime Minister of the UK from 1830 – 1834. The legend is that Grey received a diplomatic present of tea imbued with bergamot oil and liked it so much that he requested British tea traders to reproduce it.

The resultant tea gained popularity both because of its unique taste and its connection to the powerful politician.

But Earl Grey had another claim to fame. As the British Secretary of State for the Colonies in the 1840s he was the prime mover of the Australian Female Orphan Scheme begun during the Famine years in Ireland.

This Scheme was devised by the British and Australian authorities because the faraway colony of Australia was suffering from a disastrous shortage of women; 8 men for every woman there. Such an imbalance in the sexes was unsustainable and was jeopardising the future of the colony. A solution was urgently required.

The obvious remedy was to persuade women from Britain and Ireland to settle in Australia and, ultimately, to marry love-starved Australian men. However, many British girls were reluctant to emigrate to Australia, a country at the other end of the world, with a male population largely consisting of convicts.

The eyes of the British government turned towards Ireland, where a brutal Famine was raging and where the workhouses were bursting at the seams with the lost children of poverty and hunger; the chance of a new life might appeal to those desperate Irish girls.

The Australian authorities were willing to fund the costs of the Scheme and the emigration of destitute Irish girls would be a ‘win-win’ for the British government. It would cost them nothing and would reduce the cost to the Exchequer of relieving poverty in Ireland.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own