Page 68 - GAHS Journal Volume 9

IT IS THE HOME RULE BILL THAT HAS DONE THAT

Jane Evans, Emily Evans and Mary Storey - were members of a
long-established and very numerous local family. Mary Storey
and Emily Evans were actually sisters, while Mary Storey and
another woman, Agnes Storey, were sisters-in-law. There were
other links: Annie Jane and Emily Evans and Mary Storey were
all members of the Plymouth Brethren, and Agnes Storey and
yet another signatory, Deborah Webster, were the wives of
shopkeepers in the village. Three more of the Greystones
signatories, Sarah Ebbitt, Annie Dunne and Ena James, were
workmates – all were employed as assistants in McDonogh’s
drapery shop at The Arcade.

Perhaps the most interesting example of the role of
relationships, however, is provided by the Cowan/Harrison
family, several of whose members, giving their address as 65
Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin, signed their names at Greystones.
Agnes Cowan’s association with the anti-Home Rule movement
went back to the 1880s: her first husband, Sir Edward Porter
Cowan, had been a Belfast business magnate, sometime Lord
Mayor of the city, and resolute opponent of Gladstone’s first
Home Rule Bill. Following his death in 1890, Agnes married
widower and aspiring politician, Thomas Harrison, who went on
to establish himself as a barrister in Dublin and became a leading
figure in southern unionist circles. While Harrison himself
travelled to Belfast to sign the Covenant, his wife, together with
her sister-in-law, Minna Cowan, and three of her daughters,
Annie, Maude and Daisy, and her step-daughter, Florence
Harrison, signed the Declaration in Greystones. Signing at the
same time and place were Kate Adeline Booth, described as a
‘companion’ in the Cowan household, widow Sidney Blanche
Moore, who lived next door to the Cowans at 67 Fitzwilliam
Square, and Isabella D’Alton of 19 Lower Pembroke Street,
whom press reports of the time reveal to have been part of the
Cowan/Harrison social circle. Thus, of the eighteen women who

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