JULIA Devaney (left) pictured in her home with visitors from the USA, one of whom is thought to have been a resident of the Home.

A Voice from the Tuam Home - part two

JULIA DEVANEY is unique in that she left a record of her almost 40 years in the Tuam Mother and Baby Home. From entering the home as a child in about 1923, to leaving it as an employee when it closed its doors for the last time on September 16, 1961, she had an insight into every aspect of the place.

Julia was born Julia Carter in 1916, to a married couple she believed to be from Oughterard. She was left in the care of the nuns who ran the home in the former Glenamaddy Workhouse, and when that closed she was transferred to Tuam.

As described in last week’s issue, she recorded her memories on a series of tapes made by Rebecca (Rabie) Millane of Tuam.

Also as stated last week, these articles are a distillation of over 40,000 recorded words, and are intended as a tribute to Julia, and to all the mothers and children who passed through the Home, which was run by the Bon Secours sisters on behalf of Galway County Council from 1923 until it closed.

They are divided up by theme, and all words within quotation marks are those dictated by Julia herself.

* Some names have been changed to protect the identity of former residents of the Home.

 

Growing up in the Home

JULIA was unusual in that, unlike almost all the other children in the Home, she was never fostered — “boarded out”. She said that she preferred it that way.

Most of the boys and girls received only elementary primary education in Tuam, and were gone from the Home by the age of seven. About ten of the girls from the early intake in the 1920s were kept on to work as domestics.

Julia was one of them, and completed her primary education at the Mercy Convent. Thanks to the interest of Mother Hortense, who was in charge of the home and appears to have had a fondness for Julia, she spent some years in the Mercy Secondary School, where she learned music.

She remembered one nun, Sr Raphael, “and she had an awful set on me because I was from the Home. She despised me and picked on me. She is buried near the Cathedral, and years after when I was passing that way, I would stick out my tongue at her grave!”

Julia felt that she always had an inferiority complex, because she knew “it was outside people paying taxes and rates that covered the cost of keeping us in the Home.”

In school she felt looked down on. “The fact that I was from the Home, it dulled my brain at school, and I couldn’t take in as much as another child would, things didn’t sink in.

“I was never anywhere but in the back desk, I was looked upon as stupid.

“Mother Hortense asked the Mercy nuns to let me into the secondary school, it was a kind of condescension to let me in.

“If there was anything missing from the class in [primary] school, they’d always blame the girls from the Home.

“When I was in secondary school, a girl called Maura H blamed me for taking her copy, but I didn’t. I was blamed, just because I had nobody it was absolutely believed. I was about 17, I hadn’t a leg to stand on, she was a big shot and a boarder. I was condemned, I had to put up with it … I didn’t tell it to Mother Hortense.”

Julia found it hard to make friends in school. “There was a girl in secondary school very friendly with me, I think she was from Barnaderg or somewhere, and Sr Attracta said to her ‘Could you not get any other companion than Julia Carter?’

“It was hard to get pals, I was always craving to have a pal, there was a little dwarf there who would pal with me.”

* * *

Julia’s great love was gardening and working on the land. That was how she met her future husband.

When the Home on Dublin Road closed, Julia transferred to the Bon Secours Hospital on Vicar Street, known universally as The Grove, because of the name of the house in which it was first established.

The nuns grew vegetables and potatoes in the grounds, and Julia asked if she could continue to work in the garden.

Ten years before, when she was still in the Home, a man called John Devaney was a County Council employee and, with colleagues, used to do occasional repair jobs such as replacing slates on the roof.

Julia recalled “We used to make tea for them on the quiet (you wouldn’t be drawing the ould nuns on you).

“When I met him again in The Grove [a decade later], I didn’t recognise him. One day John spotted me and Jimmy Donnellan weeding the spuds and he recognised me from the Home. When I brought Mary W a bucket of spuds for washing in the kitchen, she said ‘There’s a man here looking for you’.

“It was John Devaney, and he started chatting to us, and then he told me his wife Delia had died three years ago, and that he had a fine empty house, and that he would take me out of there if I would marry him!

“He then asked me if I would go to the pictures with him on Sunday night, and I said I would go the following Sunday night, so he said OK and then said he would go and get a packet of sweets for me. [We had to stuff] dishcloths in our mouths to stop us laughing so the nuns wouldn’t hear us.

“But I did think about getting married, because I was not getting any younger and the other Home women were all gone to America, and it would be nice to have a home of my own. So I said I would.

“John was reared in Kilbannon so we got married there. He was an old man but he was kind. [Marcus Donnellan from Cloonthue was Best Man for John, while still in his teens.]

“I thought I had stepped into heaven when I first went into the house [on Gilmartin Road]. Everything looked so small, the kettle and the pots, I was used to big saucepans and huge teapots.

“John bought the messages as I had no idea how to use money and he also did the cooking as I never learned to do that. I was totally institutionalised.”

After John’s death, Julia lived on in the house in Gilmartin Road, and did gardening work around the town. She was well liked by her neighbours, some of whom became her closest friends.

She was known for her love of animals, and she was visited several times by people who had been in the Home and came back to Tuam.

 

Harsh Discipline in the Home

LIFE in the Home was utterly regimented, and ruled by fear. The constant dread among those who lived under the rule of the nuns was being sent to the Magdalene Laundry in Galway or to the Mental Hospital in Ballinasloe.

Julia says “The nuns were not friendly with myself or the other domestics, they were impersonal to us. Eileen O, Molly R, they had no personal relationship with the nuns.

“Any troublemakers were sent off to Ballinasloe or the Magdalene Laundry.

“Meg* was signed in to Ballinasloe by the nuns. They convinced the doctor to sign her in. She was great with the babies, there wasn’t a blotch on them when they were in her care. But when the nuns moved in there were plenty of blotches on them.

“Mother Hortense had a soft spot for Meg, but when she left, Meg couldn’t accept it and went downhill: she was crushed. Meg was a little slow. Even when she was depressed she kept on working — she was a great worker — but she went to bed on a Sunday and stayed in bed on Monday, and by that evening she was in Ballinasloe Asylum. They gave her no chance at all.

“Meg recovered in Ballinasloe after some time, but the nuns would not take her out. Mother Hortense [who had been transferred to Cork] wrote to me when I got married ‘Now that you are married, won’t you take Meg out’.

“I showed the letter to John, and we wrote to the Western Health Board, but they said we could only take her out for 24 hours. I went up for her but she wasn’t herself, she was hospitalised [institutionalised].”

For the mothers in the Home, the threat was that they would be put into the Magdalene Laundry in Galway.

“None of the mothers would kick up, because if they did, then they knew they would be put into the Magdalene, they’d be punished.

“Say, children who were sent out into the world and they weren’t a success, they would be sent to the laundry instead of trying to make something of them.

“Mary C was boarded out as a child and she came back from where she was boarded out, she never did anything out of the way, and she ended up in the Magdalene and met her mother in it.”

Even for those employed as domestics, discipline was tight.

“We would never, never be let out to a dance. Mrs Walsh [manager of the Odeon Cinema] might invite us to a film and we would be let out to that.

“You might be let go to the Novena in the Cathedral, but they would be watching you to come back. It was a world of its own in there. You were conditioned that there was no other life but this.”

Like every institution, the Home had its informers. The one mentioned by Julia was Cissie* who was “the only one who was always in the company of the nuns”.

“Cissie was a devil, she was like a spy. She was there since she was young herself, she had a child there, some say she had two. She came from a respectable family Athenry side.”

There must have been very many individual tragedies in the Home, but one that Julia remembered particularly was a thwarted romance.

“Mary R* [one of the domestics] was a very pretty girl when she was young, and when we were brought down to the Corpus Christi procession, there was a man, he was a clerk, and he fell in love with Mary and she used to steal down to the gate to see him, but John C and Cissie spotted them and put a stop to it. Mary was about 21, and if they had been left alone, that man would have married her. It broke her heart.”

However, Mary did marry subsequently, a widower who lived in Dublin.

 

The nuns

MOST of Julia’s life was spent in institutions run by religious sisters. The majority of them were members of the Bon Secours order, but in her time in Tuam she also encountered sisters from the Mercy and Presentation orders.

The woman who influenced her life most was Mother Hortense in the Home, whom Julia says she loved like a mother, although they did not have a close relationship.

In Julia’s account, the order wanted to move Mother Hortense from Tuam, and the only way they could do this was to make her Reverend Mother of their house in Cobh, Co Cork. She died in Cobh, and the order did not accede to her request to be buried in Tuam.

The next Reverend Mother in Tuam was Mother Martha, and she and Julia did not get on.

“My job was working in the garden and I loved it with my heart and soul. Sometimes before Mass in the early morning I’d take a ramble up the garden, and sure as anything, Mother Martha would be after me and march me down to the chapel. She ruled us with an iron hand. She had a set on us women who grew up in the home under Mother Hortense. She was softer on the mothers, though.

“Mother Martha was like an antichrist, but she was far more sensible than the ones who came before her. She understood the women better, and she was younger too.

“You couldn’t argue with Mother Martha, she would give you a thump to put you into the middle of next week!

“I was over 40 when Sr Martha came. She would keep after you. She thumped me, she would close her fist and bang it into my chest. You could not hit her back or you would be sent straight into the Ballinasloe Asylum. She thumped nobody only me and she never apologised to me.”

Julia, who was the oldest of the girls who came from the Glenamaddy Home, believed Mother Martha had a dislike of her because she had heard her being praised by Mother Hortense.

However, Martha had a more enlightened attitude than her predecessors towards the mothers who came to the Home to have their babies.

“The girls who came in from outside, she was as nice as honey to them. Maybe she thought that when they went out they would be talking about her, but anyhow she never said a word to me. She helped Eileen O to get to the USA, not financially, but helped her with arrangements.”

Julia got on better with other nuns. “Mother Ann was the most beautiful person. She was gentle, ruled by gentleness. She’d do with love what Martha did with an iron rod. She sent me a card when I got married.

“Sr Celestine was kindhearted. She came from Dublin where she used to give out the penny dinners.

“Sr Josephine [in school] was nice to me, she treated the big shots and small shots all the same. Sr Priscilla, I would canonise her.

“I remember old Sr Camillus when I was in secondary school. She would bring me behind the blackboard and give me a bottle of milk, and she would give me the price of the circus, she had no favourites between rich and poor, except maybe for Hilda C as her mother wasn’t well.

“I remember a young nun came to the Home and she almost had a nervous breakdown. She was in that department where potties were being pissed in, and then scrubbing the floors clean was the order of the day, and always putting the toddlers on pots. I remember her saying ‘I’d rather be minding pigs’. She packed her bags and she walked out, off down to Cork.”

Sr Patrick, an elderly nun, used to walk in the garden with Julia. “She would always be telling me her love stories, she was natural, she was the only nun who ever spoke to me about life, as an equal.”

After the Home closed, Julia worked in the Grove Hospital for about a year, before she was married.

She had a completely different relationship with the nuns in the hospital, none of whom had wanted anything to do with the Home when it was in operation.

“The nuns in the Grove were as natural as ourselves,” Julia said.

 

Part three to follow

If any people with memories of Julia would like to contribute them, please contact The Editor, The Tuam Herald, email editor@tuamherald.ie. Any photographs of her would be greatly appreciated.