Author Archives: Myles Dungan

On This Day – 29 September 1732 The birth of Sir Henry Cavendish – the one man Hansard.

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Charles James Fox

 

Given the fact that today’s politicians complain bitterly that there is very little reporting of parliamentary proceedings, and that, if people choose to do so, they can catch elements of pretty much any parliamentary debate on radio, TV or the web, it is difficult to get one’s head around the fact that it is only relatively recently that it has been even legal to report the proceedings of the British House of Commons in newspapers.

Journalists who attempted to report on the deliberations of the ‘Mother of Parliaments’ in the early 18th century, qualified as ‘strangers’, and could be removed from the House at the instigation of a member. This procedure, which still exists in modified form, was used in 1875 by the Irish MP Joseph Biggar, to have no less a personage than the Prince of Wales himself thrown out of the House. Biggar simply invoked the cry of ‘I spy strangers’ and everything came grinding to a halt until his future majesty was ejected.

In the eighteenth century, while it was actually legal to report the outcome of parliamentary deliberations, newspapers were not permitted to report the content of the debates themselves. Some editors and reporters were jailed for violating this parliamentary privilege. Newspapermen, in order to circumvent this passion for secrecy on the part of their betters, would record debates anyway, and then present them as thinly disguised fictional exchanges.

 

The same was true for the Irish Houses of Parliament, for much of their existence, prior to their disappearance in 1800. If you had the temerity to report on the musings of our elected representatives, you could be thrown in jail for contempt. Perhaps, if our great leaders of today were to threaten similar sanctions, they would find newspapers tripping over themselves to cover their compelling debates.

Which makes the achievement of Henry Cavendish of Lismore, Co. Waterford, all the more startling. He was a member of the aristocratic Irish family from which the Dukes of Devonshire are drawn. So he wasn’t in it for the money, because he didn’t lack for an estate or two.

Cavendish personally recorded 3,000,000 words of debate in the House of Commons in London from 1768-74. Without his furious note-taking the contributions to that parliament of the likes of Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox might have gone largely unrecorded.

However, Cavendish was not some freelance scribe chancing his arm, he was himself a member of parliament. The journal he kept was for private consumption only. However, had he not filled fifty notebooks, the record of that particular period, including important debates on North America, would have been rather more sketchy. Cavendish had done the same thing when he was an MP in the Irish House of Commons between 1776 and 1789. Using a shorthand system, developed by Thomas Gurney, Cavendish filled more than 15,000 pages in noting down the speeches of the House of Commons in London.

Cavendish served as a member of the Irish parliament for Lismore for three terms prior to the Act of Union. He also, somewhat bizarrely, was the member for the far distant Killybegs in Co. Donegal, for six years between 1791-97. His period as an English MP was spent as representative for one of the most notorious rotten boroughs in the British Commons, Lostwithiel in Cornwall. By the time of its abolition in the great reform act of 1832, it could only muster 24 electors, and had long been in the pocket of the Earls of Mount Edgecombe who could allocate the seat to whomever they wished.

While Cavendish didn’t exactly invent shorthand (though he is credited by some with the achievement) he made valuable use of the technique in an astonishing display of energy. The fact that he wasn’t expected to do much for his constituents, numbering in the dozens, gave him considerable freedom to indulge his hobby.

Sir Henry Cavendish, the one man Irish Hansard, was born one hundred and eighty-five years ago on this day.

 

On This Day – 22 September 1884 The gunboat HMS Wasp is wrecked off Tory Island

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If you were asked, what is the most northerly Irish island, you would probably hazard a guess that it was Tory Island, off the coast of Donegal. And you wouldn’t be too far wrong. The correct answer is Inishtrahull—or the ‘island of the empty beach’—which lies ten kilometres north-east of Malin Head. It also boasts the most northerly lighthouse in Ireland, which was manned until 1987.

But the most significant event in the history of the island took place more than a century earlier, and involved the loss of fifty-two lives.

The HMS Wasp was a British naval vessel, of something called the ‘Banterer class’, built in 1880 in Barrow in Furness in Cumbria. It was one hundred and twenty-five feet long, and its on-board steam engine meant that it was capable of achieving a speed of almost ten knots. It was armed with two four-inch, and two six-inch guns, and was rigged with three masts. It also carried two machine guns. The Wasp was commissioned by the Royal Navy in 1881. It intersected with the story of Inishtrahull when it became an element of the Irish Land War of the 1880s and was used to transport personnel to offshore islands in order to enforce evictions there.

In September 1884 HMS Wasp was dispatched from Westport to Moville in Donegal, under the command of Lieutenant J.D. Nicholls. It was to collect a party of court officials, Royal Irish Constabulary policemen, and bailiffs, in Moville and transport them to Inishtrahull, in order to carry out a number of evictions at the behest of the local landlord, Sir Robert Bateson Harvey. The tenants were to be dispossessed for the non-payment of rents to the value of just over seventy-six pounds. Keep that figure in your head when you hear what happened.

On the morning of 22 September 1884, with fifty-eight sailors on board, the Wasp was off Tory Island. The commander and most of the crew members were asleep. Just before 4.00 a.m. the gunboat hit a reef, the hull was split, and the craft quickly began to take on water. It sank within fifteen minutes. Only six men were able to escape and make their way to Tory island, where they were looked after by locals.

Astonishingly, after having endured such an ordeal, all six were later court-martialled by the British Navy, but exonerated. The cause ascribed to the disaster was a lack of attention to the navigation of the vessel in dangerous waters.

Given the nature of the Wasp’s mission you might have expected a less than totally sympathetic response from nationalist Ireland. However, that was not the case. The ultra-nationalist United Ireland newspaper did point out, however, that the lost gunboat itself had cost £50,000 to build, and that the loss of fifty-two lives was of incalculable value, all for the sum of seventy-six pounds and five shillings in unpaid rent. The newspaper’s editorial was scathing.

 

May we therefore assume that Sir Robert Bateson Harvey will not again have a gunboat placed at his bailiff’s disposal for the asking, and the Government will not imperil their seamen’s lives and taxpayer’s property to please a landlord? The Crown have always declined in England to provide the landlords of the Isle of Skye with vessels to overawe the crofters.

 

Among the many ironies of the tragedy was the fact that the total population of the island of Inishtrahull in 1884 was fewer than fifty souls. The previous year HMS Wasp had been used to transport much needed food supplies to the island. Inishtrahull was finally evacuated in 1929 during the first years of the new government of the Irish Free State.

The HMS Wasp sank without begin able to launch its lifeboats, at a cost of fifty-two lives, one hundred and thirty-seven years ago, on this day.

 

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On This Day – 15 September 1803 Abraham Lincoln and Robert Emmet

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They are two very different orations. One is short, a mere two hundred and sixty-nine words, and lasting barely three minutes. The other is in excess of  three thousand words, and must have taken closer to half an hour to deliver. The longer speech was given by a man marked for a judicial death, the shorter by one who would be mown down by an assassin’s bullet.

Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States of America, was born five years after the execution of the young rebel United Irishman, Robert Emmet, but the coincidental connections between the two men are compelling and inescapable.

Both were Republicans, both are perceived by their acolytes as martyrs. Emmet, a post-Enlightenment Irish Republican, atoned for the hapless nature of his one-day rebellion on 23 July, 1803 in Dublin, by making the single most famous, effective, and affecting speech in Irish nationalist history. Lincoln was one of the founder members of the anti-slavery Republican party, and its first successful Presidential candidate in 1860. His election precipitated the debilitating four-year American Civil War. His Gettysburg address was a model of rhetorical clarity, creativity and brevity.

Emmet’s speech, made after his conviction for high treason in Green Street courthouse in Dublin, is famous for its passionate peroration, made as he faced death by hanging the following day.

 

Let no man write my epitaph: for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them rest in obscurity and peace, my memory be left in oblivion and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times, and other men, can do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written.

 

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, made on 19 November 1863 at the dedication of the Soldier’s National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—scene of a bloody and decisive battle four and half months earlier—is more famous for its iconic opening line.

 

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

 

But, did Emmet’s speech influence the creation of the most famous short oration in history? Very likely. As a boy in Indiana (where his family had migrated from Kentucky) Lincoln is known to have learnt Emmet’s valedictory off by heart. As a gangly teenager he would often deliver it as a party piece, for dignitaries visiting Perry County, where he lived.

More than a quarter of a century later, at the first Republican National Convention, in New York, in 1856, where Lincoln was defeated for the party’s vice-presidential nomination, the convention Chairman was a New York Judge and politician, Robert Emmet, the Dublin-born nephew of his celebrated namesake.

In February, 1865 Lincoln, was reviewing the death sentence on a young Confederate spy. He was considering an appeal for the boy’s life from a Delaware Senator, Willard Saulsbury, who had once referred to the President as ‘a weak and imbecile man’. So, you would assume, not much hope there.

Saulsbury, however, was both frank and astute in his appeal to Lincoln. He wrote

 

You know I neither ask or expect any personal favor from you or your Administration … All I ask of you is to read the defence of this young man … compare it with the celebrated defence of Emmet, and act as the judgment and the heart of the President of the United States should act.

 

Saulsbury knew his man. The death sentence was duly commuted.

In 1939 the distinguished playwright Robert Sherwood, won a Pulitzer Prize for his play Abe Lincoln in Illinois. The significance of the play is in Sherwood’s middle name, Emmet. He was the great-great-grandnephew of the executed patriot. It was as if the Emmet family, having accepted the homage of the young Lincoln, was repaying the compliment.

 

Emmet would have been proud of the famous peroration of his celebrated acolyte.

 

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

 

Robert Emmet, was awaiting trial and probably writing the signature speech that Abraham Lincoln would later learn by heart, two hundred and fourteen years ago, on this day.

 

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On This Day – 8 September 1852 The Irish Tenant League

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Today the story of an Irish political party dedicated to the interests of large, comfortable and respectable farmers – but enough about Fine Gael, coincidentally founded eighty-four years ago today. Instead the story of an Irish political party dedicated to the interests of large, comfortable and respectable farmers. Turns out we’ve had quite a few over the years.

The Irish Tenant League was the posh cousin of the Land League of the 1880s. Someone like Michael Davitt would never have been allowed near the Tenant League. He was far too working class. But the League made the 1850s more interesting in Ireland than the decade might otherwise have been, and regularly rattled the cage of the British government, before sliding into the inevitable abyss of corruption and recrimination.

The League was established in 1850s in the wake of the Great Famine. Under the terms of the Encumbered Estates Acts a number of vulture funds were buying up distressed properties. Sorry, that’s actually more recent. Let me rephrase. A number of wealthy capitalists were acquiring bankrupt estates at knockdown prices and threatening to change the rules for sitting tenants. That’s the great thing about history. If you stick around for long enough it just keeps happening all over again.

The leading lights of the new organisation were Charles Gavan Duffy, the former Young Irelander, and the English-born journalist Frederick Lucas, editor of the progressive Catholic weekly newspaper, The Tablet.

It was the Tenant League, not its more illustrious and egalitarian successor, which came up with the three famous demands of the Irish agrarian movement, the ‘3 F’s’, dreaded by every student of Irish history. You could easily recall two, but damned if you could ever remember the third. For the record, they were ‘Fair rent, free sale and … em … em …yes,  fixity of tenure.’

The organisation of the League’s activities fell to another former Young Irelander, Newry-born John Martin, who would later precede Charles Stewart Parnell as MP for Meath. The League attracted the support of the rump of the late Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Party in the House of Commons, and in 1852 managed to return fifty Tenant Right candidates to parliament. These included Gavan, Duffy, Lucas, the banker John Sadlier  from Tipperary, and the lawyer William Keogh, MP for Athlone. The Tenant League MPs were pledged not to align themselves with any British party which failed to endorse the ‘3 Fs’, and to refuse all political preferment.

Of course, it quickly went pear-shaped. A sectarian element intervened when a cohort of Tenant Leaguers decided that the cause of Catholic religious rights was more important than forcing agrarian reform. They broke off to form the Catholic Defence Association, nicknamed ‘The Pope’s Brass Band’. In response Frederick Lucas ill-advisedly took on the powerful Roman Catholic Cardinal-Archbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen, and lost. Lucas died in October 1855, and the following month Gavan Duffy emigrated to Australia, where he became Prime Minister of the state of Victoria.

But it got even worse than that. Defying the pledge to remain aloof from political office, Sadleir and Keogh accepted positions in Lord Aberdeen’s coalition government, and joined that great anti-pantheon of Irish traitors whom we cherish to this day. Sadlier didn’t last long in office, he was gone by 1854, forced to resign when he was found guilty of trying to bring about the imprisonment of one of his bank’s customers. This errant depositor had failed to deliver on a promise to vote for Sadleir.   Two years later his Tipperary Bank went spectacularly bust and he committed suicide by drinking prussic acid.

It would be nice to report a similar fate for Keogh, instead he became a judge and handed down savage sentences to the Fenian leadership in 1867. It was left to William Gladstone, through his land legislation of 1870, and Davitt’s Land League of the 1880s, to bring into effect the principles of fair rent, free sale and … the other one.

A Dublin conference of the Irish Tenant League adopted an ill-starred policy of independent opposition in Parliament, one hundred and sixty-five years ago, on this day.

 

 

On This Day – 11 August 1796 Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin prepares to receive its first prisoners


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It’s such a huge tourist attraction today that it’s quite shocking to realise there were proposals as recently as the 1950s to demolish much of it. But Kilmainham Gaol survived intact to play a huge part in the current decade of centenaries.

It opened in 1796 and even then, it was a grim place, housing men, women, and children as young as twelve. Some were held there prior to transportation to Australia, others were lodged in the prison before their executions, some served many years there in dreadful conditions, often sharing a cell with up to four others.

Almost every self-respecting nationalist, including some far removed from revolutionary politics, spent a spell at their Majesties’ pleasure in Kilmainham.  A number did so prior to being hanged or shot. The list of guests constitutes a distinguished club, Henry Joy McCracken, Oliver Bond, Napper Tandy, Robert Emmet, Michael Dwyer, William Smith O’Brien, Thomas Francis Meagher, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, Charles Stewart Parnell, and Michael Davitt.

Attached to the Gaol was a magistrates’ court where cases would be despatched, or, if a serious crime was involved, the preliminary process leading to indictment would take place. It was here that the alleged killers of the Chief Secretary, Frederick Cavendish and his Under Secretary, Thomas Henry Burke, in Phoenix Park in 1882—the so-called Invincibles—appeared for remand hearings before being committed to Green Street court for trial. And it was here that they first realised the game was up, when one of their number, James Carey, presented himself as a prosecution witness. He had opted to turn state’s evidence to save his own skin. His first appearance at Kilmainham Magistrates’ Court was greeted with roars of rage from the dock. A reporter observed that one of the accused, Joe Brady:

 

Glared at him and stretched forward towards him [had he] been able to reach him, I believe he would have been torn to pieces, for Brady was a powerful young fellow, and for the moment he was for all the world like a tiger on the spring.

 

The prisoners were returned to their cells and a few weeks later Carey’s evidence sent five of them to the hangman, a seasoned veteran named William Marwood. His customary advice to his victims before they met their maker was, ‘Now then, hold your head back and you’ll die easy’. They were all executed in the Kilmainham Prison Yard, and their bodies were interred under the scaffold erected to hang them.

Three decades later it was the turn of the leaders of the 1916 Rising. Fourteen were executed there over a nine-day period in May. The first to die, on 3 May, were Patrick Pearse, Thomas Clarke and Thomas MacDonagh. They faced firing squads of twelve British soldiers, mostly drawn from the Sherwood Foresters, who had been badly cut up on Mount Street Bridge the previous week. There was little regard to sensitivities on either side. No Catholic priest was allowed to be present to minister to the prisoners, and the same firing squad—consisting mainly of young recruits—was expected to execute all three men. A number of female prisoners, including Countess Markievicz, were rudely awoken by the volleys from the stone-breakers’ yard.

After the establishment of the Irish Free State the prison continued to be used during the Civil War. Around six-hundred Republican prisoners were incarcerated there, many of them women. One of the last to be released was Eamon de Valera.

The prison was closed by the Free State government in 1929, and might well have been demolished in the 1930s, except it was deemed too expensive to do so. The work of organisations, like the Kilmainham Gaol Restoration Society, ensured that it was eventually taken over by the Office of Public Works, and became one of the most visited historical sites in Dublin.

It has also been a useful location for a number of films. These include the adaptation of Brendan Behan’s prison drama, The Quare Fellow, as well as the Michael Caine film The Italian Job, and Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins. Collins himself was fortunate, he never actually served time there.

Kilmainham Gaol was finally completed and prepared to accept its first prisoners two hundred and twenty-one years ago, on this day.

 

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