Category Archives: History

Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited: National Gallery

This blog serial explored aspects of the 1888 book Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American, by journalist William Henry Hurlbert. Previous posts and other background material are available at the project landing page. #IUCRevisited

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“It already contains more really good pictures than the Musée either of Lyons or of Marseilles, both of them much larger and wealthier cities than Dublin.”
–William Henry Hurlbert

On Valentine’s Day in Dublin, Hurlbert did not mention the late saint’s reliquary a few blocks from his hotel. Instead, he visited the closer National Gallery of Ireland on Merrion Square. Gallery Director Henry Edward Doyle walked him through the art museum, founded in 1864.

Hurlbert was impressed with the collection, including paintings by Jan Steen, Giovanni Bellini, Jacob Ruysdaels, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Jan Both, Paul Potter and Cornelius Begyn. He also noted the popular drawings of his host’s brother, Richard Doyle, who had died five years earlier.

“I wish the Corcoran Gallery [founded in 1869] were half as worthy as Washington, or the Metropolitan Museum [established in 1870] one tenth part as worthy of New York,” the American visitor enthused.

National Gallery of Ireland

Hurlbert never missed the chance to jab at Irish nationalism. He described the gallery director as “a devout Catholic who is also an outspoken opponent of Home Rule.” Doyle, he wrote, relayed the story that “a young sister” of Irish Parliamentary Party leader Charles Stewart Parnell [probably Anna Parnell] once was “an assiduous student” at the gallery. When Doyle revealed he did not support her brother’s political efforts, she replied with “melancholy resignation” that they no longer could be friends.

Hurlbert also referenced the gallery visit of French journalist Paschal Grousset, who spent the summers of 1886 and 1887 in Ireland as a special correspondent for Le Temps. Writing under the pseudonym Philippe Daryl, his newspaper articles were collected in the 1888 book Ireland’s Disease, the English in Ireland, and an English translation, Ireland’s Disease, Notes and Impressions. Hurlbert wrote that he “picked up” a copy of the book in Paris.

Daryl briefly described the Dublin gallery early in his first chapter, “First Sensations.” With a few exceptions, he wrote, “…the collection is not worth much … It is only a pretext for a national collection of portraits where are represented all the glories of Ireland,” including Jonathan Swift, Lawrence Sterne, Edmund Burke, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Daniel O’Connell and Henry Grattan. “Art exiled in the background, and patriotism shining to the fore.”

Doyle, the museum director, curated the portrait collection in 1874. He expanded it in 1884, shortly before Daryl and Hurlbert arrived in Dublin, to become the Historical and Portrait Gallery. These portraits of Irish heroes still hang today.

In his nod to Darly, Hurlbert also mentioned the “glories of Ireland” gallery, with its “wits and statesmen, soldiers and belles, rebels and royalists, orators and poets.” But the American dismissed the Frenchman’s suggestion that its presence “proves the passionate devotion of Dublin to Home Rule.”

NOTES: From pages 157 to 159 of Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American. Page 10 of Ireland’s Disease, and page 142, The Tourist’s Gaze, Travellers to Ireland, 1800 to 2000, Edited by Glen Hooper, Cork University Press, Cork, 2001.

NEXT: Other visitors, other books

Copyright 2018 by Mark Holan

Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited: Kilkenny visits

This blog serial explored aspects of the 1888 book Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American, by journalist William Henry Hurlbert. Previous posts and other background material are available at the project landing page. #IUCRevisited

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“Kilkenny, chiefly known in America, I fear, as the city of the cats, is a very picturesque place, thanks to its turrets and towers.”
–William Henry Hurlbert

After nearly two weeks in the northwest of Ireland, Hurlbert made his way back to Dublin for a quick stop. Next, he boarded a train at Kingsbridge (now Heuston) Station for the 35 mile trip southwest to Kildare town, then another 30 miles by carriage to Abbeyleix, County Queens (now Laois).

Abbeyleix House

The American was a guest at the “large, rambling, delightful house” of Viscount de Visci. He mentioned the fountain memorial in honor of his host’s father at the center of town, and the ancient Catholic abbey that gave the place its name, which “stood in the grounds of the present mansion.”

On 13 February 1888, the party traveled 20 miles south to Kilkenny in a snowstorm, which “enlivened rather than diminished the scenic effect of the place … [with its] two cathedrals, a Round Tower, a Town Hall with a belfry, and looming square and high above the town, the Norman keep of its castle. … The castle windows look down upon the [River] Nore, spanned by a narrow ancient bridge and command, not only all that is worth seeing in the town, but a wide glorious prospect over a region which is even now beautiful, and in summer must be charming.”

Kilkenny Castle and surrounding town.

The group visited Kilkenny College, “at which Swift, Congreve, and Farquhar,–an odd concatenation of celebrities–were more of less educated,” Hurlbert recorded. The party had luncheon at the Imperial Hotel.

Hurlbert returned to Kilkenny in March and again in June. On his second visit to Kilkenny Castle, he viewed a supper menu from a feast given by the second Duke of Ormonde to an unknown number of guests on 23 August 1711. Hurlbert recorded the menu in the appendix of his book. It included:

  • 5 Pullets, Bacon and Collyflowers
  • 6 Buttered Chickens
  • Pikes with White Sauce
  • Hasht Veal and New Laid Eggs
  • A Shoulder and Nick of Mutton
  • Haunch of Venison
  • Lobsters
  • Ragoo Mushrooms
  • Kidney Beans
  • Ragoo Oysters
  • Fritters…

…and more. Nothing is said here about the beverages served at the meal. Hurlbert described the wines and other 1668 living expenses of the first Duke of Ormonde, from the upkeep of 19 horses to buying seven dozen tallow candles, in the pages that chronicled his first visit to the castle.

NOTES: From pages 141 to 152; 319; 375-383; and 465 (menu) of Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American. 

NEXT: National Gallery

Copyright 2018 by Mark Holan

Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited: Unnamed sources

This blog serial explored aspects of the 1888 book Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American, by journalist William Henry Hurlbert. Previous posts and other background material are available at the project landing page. #IUCRevisited

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“When he wants to throw out some offensive innuendo on the Irish Party, or the Irish people, or the Irish Priests–anything Irish so it be on the National side–he nearly always introduces some unnamed and, as I believe, unnameable individual to to the work for him.”
–Father Patrick White commenting on William Henry Hurlbert

In a fortuitous coincidence, my launch of this project coincided with the January 2018 release of Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

Micheal Wolff

Wolff’s book about the American presidential administration and Hurlbert’s 1888 publication about Irish political agitation share one significant characteristic: frequent use of unnamed sources.

As we’ve discovered in this blog serial, Hurlbert was very transparent about his sympathies for Irish landlords and the unionists supporters of London’s ruling conservative Tory government. He openly disdained Irish nationalists and the island’s urban and rural poor.

In his attacks on the latter, Hurlbert often relies on unnamed sources to make his point, as Father Patrick White noted in his rebuttal pamphlet to the American’s book, Hurlbert unmasked : an exposure of the thumping English lies of William Henry Hurlbert in his ‘Ireland Under Coercion.’ [The text doesn’t show a year published. It appears to have been released in 1890 or 1891.]

Father White was Catholic parish priest in Miltown Malbay, about 20 miles west of Ennis, County Clare. In his book, Hurlbert accused the priest of organizing boycott activities, which Father White strongly rebutted in his pamphlet. I’ll return to this matter in a future post.

In a section of Hurlbert unmasked headlined “Mr. Hurlbert’s Anonymous Informants,”  Father White savaged the American author’s use of unnamed sources, which included a …

  • Catholic from the south of Ireland
  • sarcastic Nationalist acquaintance of mine
  • jarvey with a knowing look
  • shrewd Galway man
  • resident of the county who gave me his views on the Plan of Campaign
  • magistrate familiar with Gweedore

“I will not here mince words,” Father White wrote. “Such tactics as these are cowardly and contemptible … [Hurlbert] finds vent by this devise for a stream of contempt and scorn poured out on the Irish representatives, which must have been pleasant reading, indeed, for all Unionists.”

William Henry Hurlbert

Or, as the New York Sun noted in its 1891 review of Hurlbert umasked, “the third person singular indefinite is a difficult witness to rebut.”

Father White heaps more scorn on Hurlbert for cloaking some of the people he encountered late in his travels with a series of  “* * * *” in place of their name or identifying characteristics. The priest calls the device “a sensational novelty” and “a fit crowning to the work.”

In a footnote, Hurlbert explained:

After this chapter had actually gone to press, I received a letter from the friend who had put me into communication … [with these people] begging me to strike out all direct indications of their whereabouts, on the ground that these might lead to grave annoyance and trouble for these poor men from the local tyrants. … What can be said for the freedom of a country in which a man of character and position [his “friend”] honestly believes it to be ‘dangerous’ for poor men to say things recorded in the text of this chapter about their own feelings, wishes, opinions, and interests?

The explanation bolsters Hurlbert’s contention that the worst coercion in Ireland came from shadowy and violent agrarian activists, not the police and government officials who enforced the laws of London. Ireland Under Coercion does identify people in this latter group, which is why the book remains relevant for historical study.

Which brings us back to 2018, and the furor that Fire and Fury has created over reporting with unnamed sources, whether in daily online journalism or modern book publishing. I give the last word to my wife, Angie Drobnic Holan, editor of PolitiFact, from her 9 January review of Wolff’s book:

The lack of sourcing is a problem because it means evidence is given a back seat to narrative oomph. It encourages people to suspend their critical thinking skills and follow their emotions into a pleasing narrative. That narrative might be true or it might not be, and it’s almost impossible to independently evaluate.

NOTES: Bulleted “sources” from pages 54, 71, 88, 125, 152 and 179, respectively; footnote from page 361, of Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American. … Father White’s comments on pages 24, 25 and 28 of Hurlbert unmasked : an exposure of the thumping English lies of William Henry Hurlbert in his ‘Ireland Under Coercion.’ Special thanks to Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame. … New York Sun, 31 January 1891, page 7.

NEXT: Kilkenny visits

Copyright 2018 by Mark Holan

Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited: Lixnaw murder

This blog serial explored aspects of the 1888 book Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American, by journalist William Henry Hurlbert. Previous posts and other background material are available at the project landing page. #IUCRevisited

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“James Fitzmaurice took, for the sake of the family, the land from which [his brother] Edmund was evicted, and for this he was denounced as a ‘land-grabber’ and boycotted, and finally shot dead in the presence of his daughter [Nora].”
–William Henry Hurlbert

James Fitzmaurice was killed at dawn, 31 January 1888, at Lixnaw, County Kerry, about 175 southwest of Dublin, where Hurlbert awoke for his first full day in Ireland. The American journalist referenced the “hideous murder,” neatly summarized by his quote above, several times in the book he published later that year.

The Fitzmaurice murder fit Hurlbert’s narrative that the people who advocated on behalf of tenant farmers and Irish nationalism were lawless or misguided. He included Land League supporters, Catholic clergy, even British politicians.

“Mr. Gladstone [the Liberal British Prime Minister who in 1886 backed Home Rule for Ireland] would perhaps have hit the facts more accurately, if, instead of calling an eviction in Ireland a ‘sentence of death,’ he had called the taking of a tenancy a sentence of death,” Hurlbert wrote. Gladstone’s 1880 comment was generated by crop failures the year before, which meant many tenants could not pay their rent. The resulting evictions, often followed by starvation, was “very near to a sentence of death,” he said.

Three weeks after the Fitzmaurice murder, Hurlbert visited an estate in eastern County Galway. There, he touched a truth about this period of Irish history as he discussed the case with the wife of a landlord’s agent. “The tenants are in more danger than the landlords or the agents,” she said.

In Kerry and neighboring Clare, in particular, farmers and their families were targeted for boycotts if they leased land other tenants had been evicted from for refusing to pay high rents as part of the agrarian agitation, or if they fell in arrears for other reasons. Boycott activity ranged from social and economic ostracism to verbal harassment, threatening notes, livestock mutilation or physical assaults. Those who cooperated with police and other government authorities often experienced similar trouble.

Period illustration of the 31 January 1888 murder of James Fitzmaurice, witnessed by his daughter Nora. The family was boycotted in the Lixnaw community of Kerry.

On 28 July 1888, shortly after Hurlbert left Ireland, another land-related murder similar to the Fitzmaurice case occurred five miles east of Lixnaw. Boycotted farmer John Foran was shot point blank in front of his young son, instead of a daughter, in the afternoon, instead of at dawn. Their murders were among 262 agrarian crimes in Kerry during 1888, the highest tally of any county in Ireland for the year.

Two men were charged with the Fitzmaurice murder. Their trial was moved more than 200 miles away, to Wicklow, to avoid community bias. Both men were convicted and executed in April 1888, which Hurlbert neglected to mention in his book. Instead, he bashed the Irish nationalist press as “always putting in some sly word” on behalf of the two killers as it neglected the “poor girl and her murdered father.”

Five other people witnessed the Foran murder in addition to his young son, but they refused to identify the suspect in a trial that was kept in Kerry. The government dropped the case.

Both murders reverberated for years to come in legal proceedings and legislative debates about the land question in Ireland. They were raised during the special Parnell Commission hearings that began in the fall of 1888 about agrarian agitation in Ireland. They came up again in 1891 elections after Parnell’s extramarital affair became public and split the Irish Parliamentary Party.

It was through researching the Fitzmaurice and Foran murders that I first came across Hurlbert’s book, though it was hardly a primary source. For more details about both crimes and this period of Irish history, read my 2016 story, Nora’s Sorrow.

NOTES: This post is based on pages 127, 213, 251, 261 and 305 of Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American, and my earlier research of the 1888 Fitzmaurice and Foran murders. … (This post was updated to show the correct location of an estate where Hurlbert recorded the quote about Irish tenants being in more danger than landlords and agents.)

NEXT: Unnamed sources

Copyright 2018 by Mark Holan

Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited: The scenery

This blog serial explored aspects of the 1888 book Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American, by journalist William Henry Hurlbert. Previous posts and other background material are available at the project landing page. #IUCRevisited

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“I pity the traveler of the future here, if he is never to know the delight of traversing these wild and picturesque wastes in such weather as we have had today, on a [jaunting] car, well-balanced by a single pleasant companion, drinking, as he goes, deep draughts of the Atlantic air.”
–William Henry Hurlbert

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For this post, I want to step away from Hurlbert’s political and socioeconomic views of 19th century Ireland and focus on his references to Irish landscapes and landmarks. Remember, he wrote the book 130 years ago. He traveled by rail, by jaunting car, and by foot. No airplanes overhead. No map app in the palm of his hand. These examples are from the early weeks of his trip, late January and February, 1888.

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“Drogheda stands beautifully in a deep valley through which flows the Boyne Water, spanned by one of the finest viaducts in Europe.”

The Boyne Viaduct, built in 1855.

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” … despite the keen chill wind, the glorious and ever-changing panoramas of mountain and strath through which we drove were a constant delight, until, just as we came within full range of Muckish, the giant of Donegal, the weather finally broke down into driving mists and blinding rain.”

Muckish, from the Irish for “the pig’s back.” Photo by Rita Wilson/Donegal Film Office.

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“[In eastern Donegal, we] entered upon great stone-strewn wastes of land seemingly unreclaimed and irreclaimable. Huge boulders lay tossed and tumbled about as if they had been whirled through the air by the cyclones of some prehistoric age, and dropped at random when the wild winds wearied of the fun. The last landmark we made out through the gathering storm was the pinnacled crest of Errigal. Of Dunlewy, esteemed the loveliest of the Donegal lakes, we could see nothing as we hurried along the highway…”

Mount Errigal is Donegal’s tallest peak. Emma Russell/Donegal Film Office.

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“The wonderful granitic formations we had seen on the way from Gweedore stretch all along the coast to the Roads of Arranmore. At Burtonport they lie on the very water’s edge. At a place called Lickeena, masses of beautiful salmon- and rose-colored granite actually trend into the tide-water, and at Burtonport proper is a promontory of that richly-mottled granite which I had supposed to be the peculiar heritage of Peterhead, and which is now largely exported from Scotland to the United States. Why should not this Irish granite be shipped directly from Donegal to America, there to be built up into cathedrals, and shaped into monuments for the Exiles of Erin?

The jaunting car was a light two-wheeled carriage for a single horse.

NEXT: Lixnaw murder

NOTES: From top, quotes are from 115, 73, 80, 81 and 118 of Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American. 

Copyright 2018 by Mark Holan

Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited: Father McFadden

This blog serial explored aspects of the 1888 book Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American, by journalist William Henry Hurlbert. Previous posts and other background material are available at the project landing page. #IUCRevisited

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“Whatever ‘landlordism’ may mean elsewhere in Ireland, it is plain enough that in the history of Gweedore it has meant the difference between savage squalor and civilization.”
–William Henry Hurlbert

Hurlbert reached Gweedore, in western Donegal, where he visited Father James McFadden, a tenant activist. Their discussion about the priest’s recent arrest would foreshadow a more famous event one year later.

Hurlbert begins this section of the book with a detailed history of Gweedore since Lord George Hill arrived 50 years earlier and “made up his mind to see what could be done with this forgotten corner of the world. … The old rundale plan of dividing up the land among the children was put a stop to, and every tenant was encouraged not to make his holding smaller, but to add to and enlarge it.”

Hurlbert’s description of rural peasants as “children,” above and below, once again demonstrates his pro-landlord, anti-tenant bias. He continued:

“Clearly in Gweedore I have a case not of the children of the soil despoiled and trampled upon by the stranger, but of the honest investment of alien capital in Irish land, and of the administration by the proprietor himself of the Irish property so acquired for the benefit alike of the owner and the occupiers of the land. That the deplorable state in which he found the people was mainly due to their own improvidence and gregarious incapacity is also tolerably clear.”

Hill certainly made improvements in the area: drainage, roads, and mills, which he detailed in his 1845 book, Facts from Gweedore. He died in 1879, the year Micheal Davitt, Charles Stewart Parnell and others launched the Irish National Land League to reduce rents, facilitate tenant ownership and foster Irish nationalism. Father McFadden took a leadership role in the League’s local chapter, which challenged the heir, Captain Arthur Hill, and other landlords.

Father James McFadden

In January 1888, Father McFadden was arrested on a charge of inciting tenants to withhold their rents under the Plan of Campaign, an activist strategy begun in late 1886 by Irish nationalists and their supporters in America. He was waiting to begin his sentence when Hurlburt arrived on 5 February 1888.

The priest “spoke freely and without undue heat” about his arrest and trial, Hurlbert reported. Father McFadden did complain that the court clerk read in eight minutes “a speech which it took me an hour and twenty minutes to deliver.”

Hurlbert is silent about whether he asked Father McFadden if he made the inflammatory statement, “I am the law in Gweedore; I despise the recent [1887] Coercion Act.” In his meeting with Chief Secretary for Ireland Arthur Balfour earlier in the book, Hurlbert claimed he was shown the government’s evidence, which contained the statement.  

Hurlbert asked the priest if the Plan of Campaign “did not in effect abrogate the moral duty of a man to meet the legal obligations he had voluntarily incurred?”

Father McFadden replied: “If a man can pay a fair year’s rent out of the produce of his holding, he is bound to pay it. But if the rent be a rack-rent, imposed on the tenant against his will, or if the holding does not produce the rent, then I don’t think that is a strict obligation of conscience.”

Their meeting ended on a friendly note, as Hurlbert accepted a glass of wine from the priest.

***

Six days later, at Baron’s Court, County Tyrone, Hurlbert interviewed Sergeant Owen Mahony, the R.I.C. constable who provided the testimony that convicted Father McFadden.

Mahony said that he was selected to monitor Father McFadden’s speech at the Land League rally at Doe, 20 miles northeast of Gweedore, because he spoke Irish, the language used by the priest; and because he also had stenographic skills.

“What I did was to put down in English words what I heard said in Irish,” Mahony told Hurlbert. “This I had to do because I have no stenographic signs for the Irish words. … [Father McFadden] said that ‘he is the law in Gweedore, and they should heed no other’ … He dislikes me because I am living proof that he is not the only law in Gweedore.”

Father McFadden was incarcerated in April 1888 at Derry, his original three month sentence doubled during appeal. He was released in October and greeted by a cheering crowd. “He declared the imprisonment had broken neither his health nor his spirits, and that he would continue to denounce the landlords’ government,” according to a news cable from Ireland.

Hurlbert’s coverage of Father McFadden was criticized as the American’s just-published book was being “devoured by the gullible people of England.”

***

On 3 February 1889, a year after Hurlbert’s visit, R.I.C. Inspector William Martin tried to arrest Father McFadden at Derryberg, four miles west of Greedore, in connection with further agrarian agitation. The priest reportedly was still wearing his vestments and carrying the Holy Eucharist in a ciborium. A crowd surrounded Martin and beat him to death. Father McFadden and several parishioners were soon arrested for murder.

At their highly publicized trial, the priest plead guilty to a lesser charge, while the others received manslaughter sentences, according to Tim O’Sullivan’s online history of Gweedore. Father McFadden was prohibited from further political activities and later transferred him to another parish.

The priest in 1889 published his own book, The Present and The Past of The Agrarian Struggle in Gweedore,” in which he criticized Lord George Hill’s title as “Fictions from Gweedore.” He did not mention Hurlbert’s book.

The chapel at Derryberg.

NEXT: Landscapes & landmarks

NOTES: This post is based on pages 46 (Balfour meeting), and 77 to 140 of Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American. Quote about release of Father McFadden from 6 October 1888, issue of The Kingston (N.Y.) Daily Freeman. Quote about Hurlbert’s book from 8 September 1888 issue of the Dundalk Democrat.

Copyright 2018 by Mark Holan

Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited: Glenveigh evictions

This blog serial explored the 1888 book Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American, by journalist William Henry Hurlbert. Previous posts and other background material are available at the project landing page. #IUCRevisited 

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“We soon left the wooded country of the Swilly and began to climb into the grand and melancholy Highlands of Donegal.”
–William Henry Hurlbert”

After a one-day visit to Sion Mills, Hurlbert and Lord Ernest William Hamilton traveled 20 miles northwest to Letterkenny, then into eastern Donegal. They passed near Glenveagh Castle, an estate built 20 years earlier by Irish landlord and businessman John George Adair.

John George Adair

Adair began to acquire tens of thousands of acres in the Glenveagh/Derryveagh area shortly after the mid-century Famine. In April 1861, before building his castle, he evicted some 45 families totaling nearly 250 men, women and children in a fit of spite.

“Exactly what prompted him to clear the estate is disputed. It may have been the murder of his steward, James Murray, in 1861, or it may have been an incident during which he was surrounded and intimidated by tenants while he exercised the hunting rights he claimed over their land,” historian and broadcaster Myles Dungan wrote in a 2016 blog post.

Adair later acquired land in Texas and married an American widow. He died in St. Louis, Missouri, age 62, three years before the reporter’s arrival.

“A Dead Despot,” is how The Nation headlined its May 1885 story. “An American packet is bearing to a grave in Irish soil the remains of one who in life swept ruthlessly from the land hundreds of families where for generations their forefathers had dwelt. … Who speaks but good of the dead need never name John George Adair.”

As for the tenants, some found shelter in nearby workhouses and remained in the region. Many received relief passage to Australia. Others emigrated to America.

Hurlbert showed no compassion for the former tenants. He suggested that considering “the wild and rugged aspect of the surrounding country it is probable enough that these evictions were to the evicted a blessing in disguise, and that their descendants are now enjoying, beyond the Atlantic, a measure of prosperity and of happiness which neither their own labor nor the most liberal legislation could have ever won for them here.”

He approved of the plans by Mrs. Adair (“my charming country-woman”) to create a fenced “deer forest” on some of the land, “provided the people can be got to like stalking stags better than landlords and agents.”

Hurlbert wrote that “no traces are now discernible … of the too celebrated evictions.” In fact, ruins of some of the former tenants’ homes remain in what today is Glenveagh National Park, where Adair’s castle is a better maintained attraction.

Glenveagh Castle/Glenveagh National Park

NEXT: Father McFadden

NOTES: This post is based on pages 77 to 81 of Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American. 

Copyright 2018 by Mark Holan

Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited: Sion Mills

This blog serial explored the 1888 book Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American, by journalist William Henry Hurlbert. Previous posts and background material are available at the project landing page. #IUCRevisited 

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“Everywhere we found order, neatness and thrift.”
–William Henry Hurlbert

In contrast to the Dublin slums, Hurlbert arrived 3 February 1888 at the “model village” at Sion Mills, near Strabane, County Tyrone (now part of Northern Ireland), 125 miles northwest of the capital city.

He described Sion House, the mill owner’s residence, as “a handsome Queen Anne mansion [that] stands on a fine knoll, commanding lovely views on all sides. Below it, and beyond a little stream, rise the extensive flax-mills which are the life of the place.” The village contained a reading room, cricket clubs, and other amenities for the 1,100 employees, which Hurlbert reported were an even mix of Catholics and Protestants.

“I find it wise to give neither religion a preponderance, and to hold my people of both religions to a common standard of fidelity and efficiency,” mill owner Emerson Tennent Herdman told Hurlbert. This quote is used in a 2014 BBC profile of the village, which it says has maintained a reputation as “completely non-sectarian.”

The 2009 video below by the Sion Mills Buildings Preservation Trust provides more history of the mill and village. In September 2017, The Architects’ Journal reported about efforts to “remasterplan” the village.

While late 19th century Sion village and mill life under Herdman’s watch was arguably more progressive than in Belfast or other Irish linen factory locations, it’s worth remembering that workers typically toiled for 12 hours weekdays, plus time on the weekend. “Wages were low and injuries and illness were common among factory workers,” according to this Ancestry overview.

Hurlbert sneered at the “ineradicable objection of some of the peasantry to continuous industry.” He wrote of “a strapping lass of 18 who came to the mills, but very soon gave up and went back to the parental shebeen in the mountains rather than get up early in the morning to earn 14 shillings a week. Three weeks of her work would have paid the year’s rent of the parental holding.”

This chapter of the book also contains an example of 19th century sexism. Herdman steers the American reporter and some other men touring the mill to get “a glimpse of the ‘beauty of Sion,’ a well-grown graceful girl of 15 or 16 summers.” Noticing the gawking visitors, the girl focused intently on her work, proving “how completely she saw through our futile and frivolous devices,” Hurlbert wrote. Next, Herdman tells his visitors about “the ugliest girl ever employed here.” She was engaged to a blacksmith, “who lost heart of grace on the eve of the sacrifice” and “fled Sion forever” on a ship to America.

I leave it to 21st century readers to decide whether such actions and comments are felonies or misdemeanors.

Sion House

NEXT: Glenveagh evictions

NOTES: This post is based on pages 71 to 76 of Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American. 

Copyright 2018 by Mark Holan

Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited: Dublin slums

This blog serial explored the 1888 book Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American, by journalist William Henry Hurlbert. Previous posts and background material are available at the project landing page. #IUCRevisited 

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“[In the 18th century,] “the Irish landlords were more fond of living in Dublin than a good many of the Irish nationalists [are in 1888].”
–William Henry Hurlbert”

Hurlbert’s first three days in Ireland were spent in Dublin, mostly talking with unionist M.P.s and government administrators such as Arthur Balfour. He also took some time to explore the city:

“During the day I walked through many of the worst quarters of Dublin. I met fewer beggars in proposition than one encounters in [some parts of London], but I was struck by the number of persons–and particularly of women–who wore that most pathetic of all the liveries of distress, the look of having seen better days. In the most wretched streets I traversed there was more squalor than suffering–the dirtiest and most ragged people in them showing no signs of starvation, or even insufficient rations; and certainly in the most dismal alleys and by-streets, I came upon nothing so revolting as the hives of crowded misery which make certain of the tenement house quarters of New York more gruesome than the Cour des Miracles (17th century Paris slums) itself used to be.”

A German map of Dublin from 1888, the year Hurlbert visited the city.

Dublin’s growth was stunted after the Irish parliament was dissolved by the 1800 Act of Union. As History Ireland explained:

The removal of the parliamentarians, who would now leapfrog Dublin en route to Westminster, had two immediate effects. The first was that the elegant townhouses built as the urban residences of the Ascendancy became redundant (a century later many would be tenements); the second was that the service industries and consumer culture that had developed around the parliament were stripped away. This social and economic hammer blow, when combined with newly established absentee governance from London, precipitated Dublin’s long decline from second city of the empire to provincial center within the U.K. And within the U.K., Dublin’s primary function was as a transit point for the export of food and people, and the importation of British goods: a perpetual motion driven by the imperatives of Britain’s industrial centers, and which also starved Dublin of the wherewithal to develop its own manufacturing base. In the mid-19th century this economic stagnation was accompanied by one of the most significant social developments in the city’s history, as the emergent Catholic (and remaining Protestant) middle classes abandoned the city between the canals and relocated to new townships such as Clontarf and Rathmines. In the vacuum left behind, the tenements flourished.

As poor, post-Famine rural residents packed the once elegant Georgian townhouses, the wealthy targeted the structures for salvage. In his book, Hurlbert reported that Dublin-born M.P. Lord Ashbourne (Edward Gibson), author of an 1885 Irish land law known as the Ashbourne Act, spent his free time poking around the city slums “to look up some fine old wooden mantelpieces and wainscotings … A brisk trade it seems has for some time been driven in such relics of the departed splendor of the Irish capital.”

It wasn’t until the September 1913 collapse of two houses on Church Street killed seven people that serious attention was focused on Dublin’s dismal tenements. Photographer John Cooke produced a series of startling images about the city’s squalid living conditions, which he titled “Darkest Dublin.” The substandard housing, however, persisted into the second half of the 20th century.

Hurlbert did not name the streets or neighborhoods he visited on his walks. Church Street and other “between the canals” locations photographed a quarter century later by Cooke were within a mile or so of the Kildare Street hotel where Hurlbert stayed through 3 February 1888. Then, with Lord Ernest William Hamilton, he boarded the 7:25 a.m. train for Strabane, leaving behind the Dublin slums.

John Cooke photo of Dublin tenement life in 1913.

NEXT: Sion Mills

NOTES: This post is based on pages 59 and 72 of Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American. Dublin, Cork and Belfast population figures have been removed from the post as I update the figures.

Copyright 2018 by Mark Holan

Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited: Home Rule

This blog serial explored the 1888 book Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American, by journalist William Henry Hurlbert. Previous posts and background material are available at the project landing page. #IUCRevisited 

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“It is not in accordance with the American doctrine of ‘Home Rule’ that ‘Home Rule’ of any sort for Ireland should be organized in New York or in Chicago by expatriated Irishmen.”
–William Henry Hurlbert

In the early 1880s, agrarian agitator Michael Davitt and Irish Parliamentary Party leader Charles Stewart Parnell partnered in an bid to secure domestic political autonomy for Ireland–Home Rule. The effort got financial and political support from the Irish in America, roused by visits from Davitt and Parnell. Despite the support of Liberal British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, however, the legislation was defeated by unionists in 1886, two years before Hurlbert’s arrival in Ireland.

Charles Stewart Parnell

Hurlbert wrote the 1886 bill would have made Gladstone and the British government “the ally and the instrument of Mr. Parnell in carrying out the plans of Mr. Davitt, Mr. Henry George, and the active Irish organizations of the United States.” Hurlbert also recognized the Home Rule effort was not over:

“How or by whom Ireland shall be governed concerns me only in so far as the government of Ireland may affect the character and the tendencies of the Irish people, and thereby, the close, intimate, and increasing connection between the Irish people and the people of the United States, may tend to affect the future of my country. … [In the wake of the failed 1886 bill] ‘Home Rule for Ireland’ is not now a plan–nor so much as a proposition. It is merely a polemical phrase, of little importance to persons really interested in the condition of Ireland, however invaluable it may be to the makers of party platforms in my own country, or to Parliamentary candidates on this side of the Atlantic. … [It] has unquestionably been the aim of every active Irish organization in the United States for the last twenty years … [and] Parnell is understood in America to have pledged himself that he will do anything to further and nothing to impede.”

Within months of Hurlbert’s visit to Ireland, Parnell would face a special commission called to investigate his alleged links to two 1882 political murders. Though cleared two years later, he soon was scandalized by revelations of his extramarital affair with the wife of one of his parliamentary colleagues. He died in 1891, two years before a second Home Rule bill was raised (and defeated) in parliament.

Col. Edward James Saunderson

During his second and third days in Dublin, Hurlbert met with several members of the British administration and M.P.s who opposed any form of separation of Ireland from the United Kingdom. An unidentified Catholic unionist from southern Ireland told him it would be “madness to hand Ireland over to the Home Rule of the ‘uncrowned king’ (Parnell’s nickname).”

Later, Hurlbert attended a meeting of Irish unionists, where he heard a speech by Colonel Edward James Saunderson. The M.P. for North Armagh (now part of Northern Ireland) asked the audience whether they could ever imagine being governed by “such wretches” as the Parnellite nationalists?

“Never,” the crowd replied in what Hurlbert described as “a low deep growl like the final notice served by a bull-dog.” Ian Paisley and his unionist supporters echoed the response 97 years later outside the Belfast City Hall.

https://youtu.be/N_XuQTWZBH0

NEXT: Dublin slums

NOTES: This post is based on the Prologue and pages 53 to 70 of Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American. 

Copyright 2018 by Mark Holan