Ep. 4 - Panel 1A - Part 3 - The 'buoyant and quixotic' Fanny Bellingham - Marion Rogan (MU)

NPPSH Conference

Nineteenth-century Ireland saw the spread of Protestant evangelical missionary activism and the establishment of societies determined to bring the good news of salvation to the Roman Catholic population. Many women immersed themselves in the work. One such activist was Fanny Bellingham. ‘This remarkable woman, whose powers of organisation were as uncommon as her energy and quickness of judgement’ is unseen except through the lives of her male relatives and co-workers. Born in 1808, she was granddaughter of Sir Alan Castlebellingham, a substantial landowner in County Louth and the city of Dublin, William Stewart, merchant, and member of a prominent linen family from County Down . She was a committee member in the Ladies’ Auxiliary to the Irish Society which supplied and funded missionaries and Scripture Readers to follow up on the work of the male Society. With the Dublin brewer and philanthropist, Arthur Guinness, she established the Dublin Visiting Mission in 1848, sending missionaries’ into the back streets and lanes of Dublin teaching Catholics ‘the way of Salvation though Jesus Christ’. She was one of Rev. Alexander Dallas’s ‘most valued and useful aids’ in the foundation of the Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics from 1845 onwards. Married to Rev. Hyacinth D’Arcy of Clifden in Maynooth in 1852, she ‘threw herself heart and soul’ into D’Arcy’s evangelical mission in Connemara. Her fragile health soon broke down under ‘her unremitting exertions’. She died childless, aged forty-six, on 26 June 1854 in Clifden. Her name is not included on D’Arcy’s headstone. Marion Rogan is a John and Pat Hume scholar in Maynooth University. Her PhD thesis is entitled: The ‘Second Reformation’ in Ireland, 1798-1861: case study of Rev. Robert Winning and the Kingscourt District Publications.’ A retired primary school principal, she lives near Kells, County Meath.