From Kilkenny to Calcutta – how an Irish orphan became an indomitable matriarch

Lilian Dillon

Every Irish family has been touched by the great diaspora, losing loved-ones forever to the grey funnel line across the rolling sea. Their stories are recalled in song and poetry around the world. But some stories are less well-known and the tale of Lilian Dillon, a small girl from Kilkenny who found herself orphaned in Calcutta, is one.   

I was recently doing family history research for my sister-in-law Rachel Palmer from Devon. Rachel’s family are from the southern counties of England, her ancestors’ origins ranging from Suffolk in the east to Devon in the west, taking in London, Brighton and various other towns and villages along the way. Rachel’s ancestors include some fascinating characters including two ancestors with knighthoods, a Victorian chemist who invented homeopathic remedies still on sale today and a journalist who conspired with Harry Houdini to uncover fake mediums in Edwardian London.

Not far into my research I came across two Scottish lines of Rachel’s tree but was not expecting to discover Irish genealogy until Rachel’s Uncle Jan whispered to me that I should look a little further …to India.

Rachel’s maternal line includes a branch of families living in India, many working in the country’s gargantuan railway network from the mid-1800s, who saw out the final years of rule of the East India Company through the subsequent eight decades of rule by the British Crown, (the Raj). Just like in Ireland, the history of British rule in India is contentious, though what interests me is the impact of history on the microcosmic lives of individuals.

One such individual was an Irish girl named Elizabeth (aka Lilian) Dillon, who we discovered to have been Rachel’s 3 x great grandmother. Her story is remarkable, born in Kilkenny in 1849, as the great hunger ravaged the country and its destitute population flocked to the ports for steerage on America-bound ships, Lilian’s father Matthew took the option of a career in the British army and joined an Irish regiment where he became a captain.  

From the Flight of the Wild Geese in 1691 when Irish Jacobite forces left to serve in continental armies, Irish soldiers gained a formidable reputation around the world. Ironically though not surprisingly, Irish regiments were highly valued by the British army, fighting in battles from Bunker Hill in the American Revolutionary War to the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean.

As Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, a Longford born unionist said “…Jack Frost is the best recruiting sergeant we have” and the East India Company having previously taken advantage of this principle in the early 19^th century, had actively targeted Ireland to recruit men like Matthew Dillon with the promise of food, clothes and a roof over their heads. Irish officers and soldiers, it is said, made a disproportionate contribution to the 'steel frame' around which the Raj was built. There were nearly as many Irish men in the Bengal Regiment as there were English, Welsh or Scots. In the 1850s enlistment to the army was for a minimum of 21 years, so when soldiers were sent to India they often took their wives and children with them.

The Indian Mutiny, also called the 1^st War of Indian Independence began in May 1857 when Indian troops known as sepoys rose up against the rule of the British East India Company. The mutiny quickly escalated into a civilian rebellion across the central northern regions of India. Accounts of the atrocities on both sides of the fighting make shocking reading. Much was made of the brutality of the rebels not just towards besieged British soldiers but civilians too, especially women and children, though this must be balanced against the violent retribution of the British army.

It was in this rising that 8 year old Elizabeth Dillon saw her parents murdered and also lost her brother Wentworth. Perhaps, like Rudyard Kipling’s hero Kim (an orphaned Irish military child in India named Kimball O’Hara), little Elizabeth might have taken to the roads as a vagabond, but we know that she was ultimately taken in by a Catholic orphanage run by nuns in Calcutta where conditions though “harsh” were better than starvation.

When Elizabeth was 19, the nuns had her married to an Italian opium and indigo planter named Dominic Rossetto. The couple had two children, Frederick Rossetto (Rachel’s 2 x great grandfather) and his sister Mary Angela. When Dominic died she married one Frederick Coaker but left him because of his bad treatment of her son Frederick. Her third marriage to William Robinson was happier and she had three more children.

From the unimaginable trauma of seeing her parents murdered and losing her brother, brought up as an orphan amidst the poverty of 19^th century Calcutta, becoming a widow, then escaping an abusive second marriage, Lilian Dillon survived to become a respected lady of Indian-European society. Her descendants recalled her as a quiet, serious, but indomitable woman, a devoted matriarch to her family. Just like Kipling’s fictional Kim, neither wholly British nor Indian, Lilian endured the struggles of this vast land of contrasts and tensions to assert her own identity and independence.  

Lilian lived her final years in the comfort of a Calcutta nursing home and died in 1921.