extracted from the Appletree Press title Hiring Fairs and Market Places by May Blair. COUNTY TYRONE In the midst of the mêlée, usually somewhere near the Town Hall, stood the boys and girls waiting to hire and the farmers waiting to hire them, amongst them Ellen McFadden and Sheila Gallagher who like Rose Welch had left the west coast of Donegal to seek their fortune in Tyrone. Ellen was fortunate in that she hired at a place where she was to remain happily to the end of her days while Sheila, like Rose, married and settled in the area in which she hired. Other servant girls weren’t so lucky. WF Marshall sums up the attitude of one of them towards a previous employer in his poem Sarah Ann: ‘Sure ye min’ the girl for hirin’ that went shoutin’ thro’ the fair, “I wuntered in wee Robert’s, I can summer anywhere”.’ Ellen was fifteen when she first left home in 1922. She had intended hiring in Letterkenny, but had mistaken the date and found herself travelling a further twenty miles to the Strabane fair which was being held the following Monday. She knew that an Evelyn Logue who had a lodging house somewhere in the main street always welcomed boys and girls from her native Gweedore and it was to her that she made her way on arrival. Here in Ellen’s own words is her story: ‘I was with some other girls. We had left home anonst and we were anxious that we would hire for we didn’t want to have to go back home. I hid my clothes in the hen house the night before, all ready for leavin’ in the mornin’. My father was dead from we were weans [children] and I wanted to earn some money for my mother. We would all have liked to hire in the one place, but no, it was one here and one there. I had this notion that I would like to hire with a woman, and here didn’t this widow-woman come up to me and says, ‘Are you for hirin’? I’m lookin’ for a good girl to help me on the farm. I need somebody that can milk.’       'She was a Mrs Kelly – Margaret Kelly. She had a farm near Clady and a pub in the town. Her daughters looked after the pub and her son managed the farm. She was very good to me – even better than my own mother. This was her farm. It’s mine now. When her son died he said in his will that he was leavin’ the farm to his housekeeper that had been so good to him and his mother. This was his house. It was thatched up ’til last year. When I came here first that floor was flagged and that was an open fire. There’s the big black kettle yet. My room was through that door beside you there. I nursed old Mrs. Kelly County Tyrone for the last three years ’til she died. It used to be that if I was going to chapel or going to town, my first stop was at her grave but I’m not fit now.’       Sheila Gallagher travelled the same road at the same tender age. Her parents had prepared her by sending her out to work locally at the age of eight. She attended school in winter but come the month of May off she went to earn a few shillings herding cattle. Oddly enough she remembers those days with affection, especially the time spent with the O’Donnells who had no family and treated her like she was their own.       However all this was merely a preparation for the big hiring in Strabane. Like Ellen, Sheila arrived the day before the fair and took lodgings for the night. She was out early the next morning at the eye of the market house along with hundreds of others – just like a herd of cows. Those for hire always stood under the market house clock. It was the biggest clock Sheila had ever seen. Before long a man tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Are you for hirin’?’ he asked, staring hard at her. ‘I need a girl to milk the cows, wash spuds, clean the house, help wi’ the washin’.’ Could Sheila do these things he wanted to know. Sheila replied that she had learnt to do all these things. He offered her three pounds and she was hired. For a while she kept up the pattern of working away from home in summer and going home in winter but eventually hired full-time, returning to Strabane to re-hire each May and November.       Farmer William Mehaffy hired his servant girls in Strabane. William farmed around 90 acres in the townland of Carricklee about a mile and a half outside the town. He hired both men and girls as did his father before him and probably his grandfather before that. Mostly hired men and women worked hard, were happy in their work and lived as one of the family. William remembers those years:       'We mostly managed to get servant men that we knew. My mother came from Donegal and there were people up there beside where she came from, the name of McKnight. We had three of them at different times. One of them came and spent two or three years with us and went to Canada and then down to the States. The next brother spent five or six years with us, joined the Specials while he was with us and he went to Canada too. He came back then during the last war and he had joined the Canadian Army. He was on his leave and when he came to us we gave him a suit of clothes and a bicycle for he couldn’t go back to see his people in Convoy in his uniform. The third one worked with us for a few years and then went home.       'I had different other people. There was that fellow in the photograph – Bob Montgomery. He was from Carnone. Then he went away and joined the army. Mostly I knew who I was getting but I did have to hire girls in the hiring fair – had to make a bargain with them. I hired one girl one time and nearly got two but she got away just in time. She used to let the servant man in through her bedroom window when he came home late at night and you can guess the rest. She married a neighbour man after that and had thirteen children. Sometimes you had to clean the fleas off them but mostly they were clean and honest. The girls used to work with farmers for a year or two, then get married and get a job in Herdman’s mill. That entitled them to get a mill house. They came from all over Donegal, mainly the Rosses, Bloody Foreland and the off-shore islands. This part of the country is full of their decendents – thousands of them! Girls worked both inside and outside the house. You see long ago the water had to be carried from a well across the road. Then there were pigs and calves to feed, cows to milk by hand, hens to feed. The girls would have helped with those things. In those days we lived in a thatched house. Then in 1923 we built a new house and had all the facilities we needed after that.       'The servant girl lived in. She maybe slept in a room with my sisters. When I was wee I slept with the hired help too. My brother and I slept in one bed and the hired man slept in another. The people we got were treated like ourselves – ate the same food at the same table. If they lived near, they got home on a Sunday and took their washing with them. There was no contracts; just word of mouth. We kept a wee book, a wages book, and they gradually lifted so much to keep them smoking. Sometimes at the end of six months a man would have nothing to get. One fellow we had was overdrawn and cleared off. He had done the same with the previous farmer only we didn’t know that at the time. But most of them were honest.       'My father would sometimes have hired men for a quarter – August till November to help with the harvest and potato digging. That was over and above the ploughman. He did all the ploughing and horsework. There was no such thing as ‘hours’. The ploughman got up about six, fed the horses, cleaned the stable and maybe fed the cattle before he got his breakfast. Sometimes he harnessed the horses before he got his breakfast too. On a wet day he would have cleaned the harness. We used to have two horses. Then when we got a binder we had to borrow a horse till such times as we could buy one, for it took three to pull the binder. Before that we used a reaper and somebody had to tie the sheaves behind it. We would have got extra help for that at harvest time and paid them half a crown a day. I think the last hiring in Strabane was about 1949.       Extracted from the Appletree Press title Hiring Fairs and Market Places by May Blair. Previous extract regarding County Tyrone: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Forthcoming extracts regarding County Tyrone: Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12

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