Born: Unknown, Ireland
Died: 9 November 1877
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Linde Lunney. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Holmes, Elizabeth (d. 1877), philanthropist, was probably a daughter of Richard Holmes (d. 1820) of Oakfield, Co. Sligo, and Anne Holmes (née Erskine). She had at least two brothers: one was Joseph (fl. 1845–68), a JP, DL, land agent for two large estates, and owner of 1,136 acres in Co. Sligo. In 1837 he was assisting charity schools in his parish; when the famine of the 1840s began, he and his sister (as the only resident landowners) tried to help the local people. As a result of their efforts, several tons of food provided by the Friends’ Relief Committee were distributed, and Joseph Holmes paid for the making of clothing for 500 people. He also intervened in local markets to try to keep down food prices, selling tons of food at cost; his brother claimed he had expended £20,000 in so doing. Despite this, relations with the local community were often fraught: on 6 January 1848 Alexander Holmes, Joseph’s brother, confronted the local parish priest, Fr Denis Tighe, in the church during mass, alleging that Tighe had incited strangers to come to the parish to murder his brother. Joseph Holmes took refuge in England for a month, but returned to Clogher thereafter, when presumably the threat had been removed.
In October 1847 Elizabeth Holmes wrote to the Rev. John Edgar, a presbyterian minister in Belfast who was prominently associated with many charitable initiatives, including the Belfast Ladies Relief Association for Connacht. She asked that a schoolmistress should be sent to teach the poor women and girls of the area round her home at Clogher House, near Ballaghadereen, Co. Mayo. Because of her archaic and strongly formed handwriting, Edgar took his correspondent to be a very elderly grande dame, and addressed her as ‘My very good patriarch’ (quoted in Killen, 244). Despite his comments about her ‘old Abrahamic penmanship’ (ibid., 245), and despite the fact that the Holmeses were members of the Church of Ireland, Elizabeth persisted in her requests for a presbyterian preacher, as well as a schoolmistress. Edgar’s reply was characteristically forthright: ‘You don’t know what you are doing at all when you ask me to send you a preacher. You don’t know that I am a blackmouthed presbyterian of the same kidney as the Free Church of Scotland and were I to send you such a preacher as I have control over, as honorary secretary of the Irish presbyterian church, it would raise about your ears a hornet’s nest of Puseyite episcopalians and for anything I know set your cap in a blaze’ (ibid., 244). Edgar’s informal letters and their mutual interest in religious work laid the foundation for a lifelong friendship. Edgar’s correspondence suggests that in the work of philanthropy, and in the urgency of the disaster in Connacht, he treated women as colleagues and even equals.
At length, the Belfast Ladies Relief Association, which by 1852 was supporting fifty-six schoolmistresses in Connacht, provided funds to assist the Holmes family’s school. In September 1847 it contained 220 children, who were fed once a day. Joseph Holmes gave two acres of land in perpetuity for the schoolhouse, and Elizabeth Holmes, at a cost of over £2,000, had several buildings erected on the site, including a church and a manse. The charity and religious work organised by the Belfast women was supported by gentry women, such as Holmes, in the west of Ireland; those whom Edgar called ‘my . . . Connaught ladies’ undertook to look after the welfare of the schoolmistress as well as of her pupils. The embroidery work taught to the girls provided them with an income that saved many lives during the famine, and with a skill that later enabled many to emigrate. Although many protestant women took an interest in such work, Holmes’s own benefactions were described as ‘princely’ (quoted in Killen, 245) and her labours for charity and mission were said to be ‘heroic’ and ‘self-sacrificing’ (Presbyterian Churchman, i (1877)). The Clogher mission station was regarded by those interested in the spread of protestantism among the catholic populace as a model establishment. It was erected into a full congregation in 1872, but withered away thereafter, and was defunct by 1930. Elizabeth Holmes died unmarried on 9 November 1877, and was buried at Clogher.