Hopefully Clara will soon honour Anne Jellicoe with a street name. Susan M. Parkes, the author of a history of Alexandra College, Dublin contributed a valuable short life of Anne Jellicoe to the Dictionary of Irish Jellicoe (now online) was a pioneer in establishing a craft industry in Clara during her ten years there in 1848–58. The early 1850s was a time when many craft industries were established by boards of guardians and convents. Some such as that connected with the Mercy convent schools, Tullamore lasted less than five years. That at Clara was also to have a short life. Michael Goodbody in his The Goodbodys (Dublin, 2011) noted that John Jellicoe, a quaker miller from Monasterevan leased the Erry, Clara mill from John Dugdale in 1848. The mill was destroyed by fire in 1849 and rebuilt, and after Jellicoe’s time was worked by the Perrys. It was in 1850 Goodbody states that John Jellicoe’s wife Anne started a lace making school in Clara to provide work for local girls. She also began to teach embroidery, an idea taken from Mountmellick. By 1854 the craft school was in trouble because ‘the new priest beat the work girls from Anne Jellicoe’s school to make them attend his own’. The source of the row may have been religious instruction (Goodbody, 2011, 216). By 1856 the contents of the lace school were auctioned off. Clara would have more trouble with its parish priest and bishop in the 1890s. The Jellicoes left Clara in 1858. There are further references to the Jellicoes in the diary of Lydia Goodbody published in 2021 under the title 100 years of Clara history: a Goodbody family perspective. Anne Jellicoe would be a fitting inspiration in the event of new housing state in Clara needing a name. Dead over 100 years now there could hardly been an objection from Offaly County Council.
Susan Parkes records for the DIB that Anne Jellicoe (1823–1880), pioneer of women’s education and founder of Alexandra College, Dublin, was born 26 March 1823 at Mountmellick, Queen’s Co., the daughter of William Mullin (1796–1826), a quaker schoolmaster, and his wife, Margaret Mullin (née Thompson; 1801–1840). She had one brother, John William Mullin. Her father ran his own ‘superior’ school for boys, which taught English, history, the classics, and higher mathematics. She was educated probably by a governess, and on 28 October 1846 she married John Jellicoe (1819–60), a quaker miller of Monsterevan, the son of John Jellicoe and his wife, Elizabeth Thompson, of Flemingstown, Co. Tipperary. There were no children of the marriage. In 1848 the Jellicoes moved to Clara, King’s Co. (Offaly), where Anne set up a lace and embroidery factory, in association with the quaker Goodbody family, to provide employment for women. She became interested in women’s working conditions and, after she and her husband moved to Harold’s Cross, Dublin, in 1858, where she continued her work.
Widowed in 1862, Jellicoe increased her involvement in social work and in particular supported the Cole Alley infant school, Meath Street, which was run by quakers for the poor children of the Liberties area. In 1861 she prepared a critical paper on the conditions of women employed in factories for the first Dublin meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (founded 1857). This paper (published in Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 1861, 640–45) was read for her, but later she was invited to read another paper, ‘Woman’s supervision of women’s industry’ (Englishwoman’s Review, viii (Feb. 1862)), at a social science meeting in London in 1862. She presented her next paper, ‘Visit to the female convict prison at Mountjoy, Dublin’ (Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 1862, 437–42), to the Social Science Congress in London in 1862. In 1861 she was co-founder with Ada Barbara Corlett (qv) of the Irish Society for Promoting the Training and Employment of Educated Women, later known as the Queen’s Institute, which provided training courses for women and assisted with their employment.
In the early 1860s Jellicoe became more concerned about the lack of formal education for middle-class women, many of whom sought employment as governesses, than with working and prison conditions. In 1866 she founded Alexandra College in Dublin to provide higher education for women. In this enterprise she was ably assisted by Richard Chenevix Trench (qv), Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin (1864–86), and the college was modelled on Queen’s College, London (founded 1848), with which Chenevix Trench had been closely involved. Alexandra College was the first university-style institution for women in Ireland; the broad curriculum included English language and literature, mathematics, history, natural science, geography, Latin, mental and moral philosophy, music, drawing, and callisthenics. Jellicoe was lady superintendent of the college (1866–80), and it flourished under her leadership and guidance. She had to work with a college council of clerical and academic men, while herself not a member of the council. Alexandra received much support from the staff of TCD, many of whom gave lectures. In 1869 Jellicoe founded the Governess Association of Ireland to assist women seeking employment as governesses by providing studentships at Alexandra College. In 1869 the college was influential in persuading the authorities at TCD to set up examinations for women, so that female students could be examined in university subjects and thereby display their academic ability.
In 1873 Alexandra School was founded as a ‘feeder’ high school for girls and from the 1880s it flourished under the headship of Isabella Mulvany, one of the first woman graduates of the RUI and another pioneer of the higher education of women. In 1878, just before her death, Jellicoe was active in the successful campaign to extend the Intermediate Education Act 1878 to girls’ schools. Along with pupils from other girls’ secondary schools, the pupils from Alexandra School and College entered for the intermediate board public examinations at the junior, middle, and senior grades, winning prizes and exhibitions, and thus preparing the way for the admission of women to higher education. Jellicoe died 18 October 1880 at the age of fifty-seven at her brother’s house in Birmingham; she was buried at the Friends’ burial-ground at Rosenallis, Queen’s Co. A woman of determination and great humility, she said: ‘The success of the College is my ample reward’ (Commemoration day speech, 1869). Two portraits of Jellicoe are preserved at Alexandra College. There is a memorial tablet to John and Anne Jellicoe in the chapel of Mt Jerome cemetery, Harold’s Cross, Dublin.
Sources
Alexandra College, Dublin, archives; Religious Society of Friends, Historical Library, Dublin; Alexandra College, Commemoration day speech (1869); Second report of the commissioners of Irish education inquiry (HC 1826–7 (12.) XII.); Anne O’Connor and Susan M. Parkes, Gladly learn and gladly teach: a history of Alexandra College and School, Dublin, 1866–1966 (1984); Anne O’Connor, ‘Anne Jellicoe (1823–80)’, Women, power and consciousness in 19th-century Ireland, ed. Mary Cullen and Maria Luddy (1995), 125–60; Patricia Philips, ‘The Queen’s Institute, Dublin (1861–1881): the first technical college for women in the British Isles’, Prometheus’s fire: a history of scientific and technological education in Ireland, ed. Norman McMillan (2000), 446–63; Rosemary Cullen Owens, A social history of women in Ireland (2005)
To this list can be added Michael Goodbody’s book on the Goodbodys (2011) and 100 years of Clara history (2021). Also David Dickson’s, Dublin (London, 2015). It was he who described as the quiet and determined revolutionary.
Other sources such as Wiki record that:
The Jellicoes moved to Dublin in 1858 where she helped revive Cole Alley Infant School for poor children of all religions run by the Quakers.[5] With support of the Dublin Statistical Society, established in 1847 to tackle social problems, Jellicoe developed observation and research techniques that she used to investigate prisons, slums and workplaces in Dublin. She was asked to present a paper at the 1861 meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science on the conditions of women working in factories in Dublin.[3] She collected data on wages, working conditions and advancement opportunities. She concluded that women employed in these institutions were helpless working in insecure positions. She spoke to pillars of society on the importance of educating the working class by establishing infants schools and evening schools for older girls.
On 19 August 1861 Jellicoe, along with Barbara Corlett, founded the Dublin branch of London-based Society for Promoting the Employment of Women to educate women for work outside the home.[3] The response to the Society was overwhelming. In the first couple of years over 500 women registered for classes with the Society.[3] Jellicoe quickly found that the gentlewomen attending the courses thought working for wages was taboo and social suicide. This prompted her to found a new employment society Queen’s Institute. The classes provided by the Institute focused on practical skills such as bookkeeping, secretarial skills and sewing-skills that would result in employment. One teacher there was Mary Fisher Gough, who taught scrivenery for the life of the Institute.[6] Potential employers began to show an interest in Institute graduates, most prominently the Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company, which provided equipment and its head engineer as a teacher.[3]
Jellicoe’s work with the Institute led her to realise that women must be educated before they could be trained. She was widowed in 1862, and using her £3000 inheritance, she financed a more permanent home for the Queen’s Institute.[5] In 1866, with the help of Archbishop Richard Chenevix Trench, she founded Alexandra College, Dublin, the first women’s college in Ireland to aim at a university type education. The college was named in honour of the then Princess of Wales.[5] The college offered advanced education for women with classes offered in Greek, Latin, Algebra, Philosophy and Natural Sciences among others.[3] Her foundation of the Governess Association of Ireland followed in 1869[4] and Alexandra School, a secondary school attached to Alexandra College, was founded in 1873.[7]
Death and legacy
The Jellicoes had no children,[1] and John died in 1862.[8] Anne died suddenly in Birmingham whilst visiting her brother on 18 October 1880 aged 57 and she is buried at the Friends’ burial-ground at Rosenallis.[1] The Queen’s Institute did not last long after her death, closing its doors in 1881.[3] There are two portraits of Anne in Alexandra College, and a memorial tablet to both John and Anne in the Chapel of Mt Jerome cemetery, Harold’s Cross, Dublin.[1] There is a plaque dedicated to Anne at the site of the Queen’s Institute, which is now Buswells Hotel, erected by the National Committee for Commemorative Plaques in Science and Technology.[9]
^ Freemans Journal of 27 December 1862
^ Ask About Ireland. “Irish Scientists”. Ask About Ireland. Retrieved 16 April 2015.
Publication
- ‘Woman’s supervision of women’s industry’ (1861) Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science
- ‘Visit to the female convict prison at Mountjoy, Dublin’ (1862) Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science
Published as part of the County Offaly 2025 Commemorative Programme with the support of Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media
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