In the decades preceding the 1916 Rising, an extraordinary revolution had already taken place in rural Ireland. The British government had lost its patience with Irish landlords who owned 95 per cent of the land of Ireland (100 percent of county Galway was landlord owned ), and had largely squandered their wealth leaving themselves vulnerable to poor harvests, successive seasons of bad weather, and an increasingly impoverished tenantry.
Their tenants could no longer pay their rent, and they in turn had united under the Land League banner, and other protest groups, to put extreme pressure on landlords by crippling livestock and threatening their agents, some of whom they murdered, and some landlord homes were burnt to the ground.
An enlightened chief secretary Arthur Balfour (1887 - 1891 ), and his successor George Wyndham, introduced a series of land reforms in the late 19th and early 20th century, that within 11 years totally stood landlordism on its head. Within that time 75 per cent of Irish land was now in the hands of its former tenants, who were able to purchase the land they had farmed all their lives, through generous borrowing schemes. This led to an exodus of many landlords from their estates, allowing additional land to be available for sale. For the first time since the land settlements of the 16th and 17th centuries land was owned by the native people of Ireland.
The writer Elizabeth Bowen, whose Cromwellian ancestors settled in confiscated lands in north Cork, and later built Bowen’s Court in Kildorrery, recalled: ‘My family got their position through an injustice, they enjoyed their position through privilege.’
Vicious Land War
In Terence Dooley’s interesting book, ‘Burning the Big House’ * he reminds us of how landed ‘gentry’ protected their privilege through snobbery. Bowen’s grandmother would receive only barristers but not solicitors, wine merchants but not brewers, and the only social ranks lower than her own whose company she would tolerate were Church of Ireland clergymen, and officers of the army and the navy invariably drawn from landed backgrounds.
Similarly in 1880, Isabel Chavasse of Newcourt wrote: ‘ Such a thing as shaking hands with anyone who was not of our own class was unheard of. I remember my father’s indignation once when some farmer tried to shake hands with him. To us the world was divided into two classes: the people to shake hands with, and the people not to shake hands with’.
The niceties of hand shaking were to be lost in the vicious Land War where the privileged position of the Anglo Irish landlord class, almost one hundred per cent Protestant, would be challenged at every level: political, economic and social.
The personality and temperament of the landlord, of course, was an important factor in how proprietors were regarded by their tenants and people in general. Edward Martyn, of Tullira, (unusually a Catholic landlord ), had little understanding or sympathy with the local people. His near neighbour in south Galway, however, Lady Gregory of Coole, though a Protestant, understood them completely, even if only imaginatively, and was trusted by them. Yet as the Land War intensified, and the future of landlords uncertain, she had fears like others of her class.**
Prisoners of inheritance
The crown solicitor for Galway John Blakeney, writing in 1849, gave what can probably be accepted as a balanced judgement on Galway landowners. He wrote that many of them were kind and indulgent, but he regretted that they were those ‘who have rackrented and conacred (let land to outside farmers for grazing ) to an extent inhuman in the extreme, squeezing from their unfortunate tenants, beyond its value, the last squeezable farthing, what the land could yield’, without making any effort to improve their lands or better their tenants’ condition.
These landlords saw landlordism as a business, and had no interest in the humanity of their tenants. And in the main were glad to sell out to their tenants, take the money and run.
Those landlords that sold land, but retained sufficient land to farm, stayed behind because being prisoners of their inheritance, saw only that Ireland was their home, and they wanted to stay.
Yet despite the pressure brought to bear by the succession of land reform acts, and the clear indication that Britain had lost all patience with the Irish landlord class, when the call to arms came in August 4 1914 a surprising 33 per cent of the British army’s officer corps consisted of the Irish landed elite. *** They still felt a sense of duty to England, and a belief in the unity of the two countries.
Workers delighted
There was no conscription in Ireland, although an estimated 200,000 men joined the armed forces, despite being fiercely opposed by Irish nationalists. The leader of the Irish parliamentary party John Redmond, who believed that Home Rule for Ireland was in the bag, told the House of Commons that if Irish Catholics in the south, fought beside their Protestant brothers in Ulster ‘it would not only be good for the Empire, but good for the future welfare and integrity of the Irish nation.’
Sadly some 40,000 Irishmen died in that conflict, among whom the Anglo Irish officer class was decimated. Anita Leslie, the well known author of the Edwardian period, who lived and wrote at Oranmore castle, was born in Glaslough House (now Castle Leslie ) in Co Monaghan, recalled how the news of her adored uncle Norman’s death, an officer in the war, was announced to the family. In October 1914, the family was overjoyed when estate workers were delighted to see Norman walking around his favourite Glaslough haunts. Relief turned to anxiety when he failed to turn up at the castle for evening dinner. A few days later a telegram arrived reporting his death at the battle of Armentieres, the day he was seen in the castle grounds. An ornamental sword, which he took with him as a good luck charm, was found by a local Belgian farmer and returned to the family in 1932.
‘Fell into despair’
Augusta Lady Gregory, despite her long association with the Coole estate, never actually owned it. She married Sir William Gregory in 1880 and they had one son Robert. Robert would inherit the house and lands on his 21st birthday, and his mother ensured that, despite her good relationships with her tenants, rents were paid on time (allowances were made if requested ), determined to hand over the estate in good order, which she did. Robert married a fellow art student Margaret Parry, and they had three children. He had an affair with photographer Nora Summers, one of a group of artists who enjoyed holidays on the ‘flaggy shore’ in Co Clare. Its discovery and upset at home probably prompted him to join the Connaught Rangers before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps in 1915. He was 34, when the average age of pilots was in their 20s. He had an outstanding military career, credited with 19 enemy victories, winning the Military cross, and the Légion d’Honneur. Her was promoted to major. He died, probably as a result of a reaction to an anti-typhoid vaccine, when his Sopwith F.1 Camel crashed near Padua, Italy, in the last few months of the war. An accomplished landscape artist, and stage designer, he is the subject of WB Yeats’ famous poem, An Irish Airman foresees his death.’ His mother was devastated.
In his will Robert left Coole to his wife Margaret, who allowed Lady Gregory to live there for her lifetime. Margaret remarried, this time to Guy Gough of Lough Cutra Castle, and who was the only survivor of the Ballyturin ambush where the District Inspector Captain Blake and his lady companion, with two officers, Capt Cornwallis and Lt McCreery, were shot dead. A distraught Margaret decided to get away, and to sell Coole. Its remaining lands were sold according to the land acts of the day. Lady Gregory remained on as its only tenant until her death May 22 1932. Yeats was in constant attendance during her final year. When she died he wept uncontrollably. The house fell into disrepair, and was eventually demolished.
A memory
In his introduction to the 1958 Burke’s Landed Gentry of Ireland, Mark Bence-Jones described August 4 1914 (when Britain declared war on Germany ), as the ‘last day of Ireland’s ancient regime’ and claimed that ‘this was not just the beginning of a war but the end of a nation’.
Later in his Twilight of the Ascendancy (1987 ) he reiterated that ‘in all too many houses in 1919 the young master was no more than a memory and a photograph in uniform on a side table.’ *
“ It is in the cottages and workhouses here that we find the really cultivated classes” Lady Gregory wrote to the German Celtic scholar Kuno Meyer, “the peasantry are the foundation of the world - the upper classes get worn out.” **
Next week: The fight for land continues.
NOTES: * Published by Yale University Press, 2022, on sale €34.95.
** Estates and Landed Society in Galway by Patrick Melvin, published by Edmond Burke and Co, Dublin, 2012.
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