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Birth of Andrew Kettle, Agrarian Reformer & Nationalist Politician

Andrew Joseph Kettle, a leading Irish nationalist politician, progressive farmer, agrarian agitator and founding member of the Irish National Land League, is born on September 26, 1833, in Drynam House, Swords, County Dublin.

Kettle is one among six children of Thomas Kettle, a prosperous farmer, and his wife, Alice (née Kavanagh). His maternal grandmother, Mary O’Brien, had smuggled arms to United Irishmen in the district in 1798, while her future husband, Billy Kavanagh, had been a senior figure in the movement. He is educated at Ireland’s most prestigious Catholic boarding school, Clongowes Wood College. His education is cut short when he is called to help full-time on the farm. Though an autodidact and always a forceful writer, he is beset later by an exaggerated sense of his “defective education and want of talking powers.” Fascinated by politics, he enjoys the repeal excitement of 1841–44 and in his late teens speaks once or twice at Tenant Right League meetings in Swords. Through the 1850s and most of the 1860s he sets about expanding the family farm into a composite of fertile holdings in Swords, St. Margaret’s, Artane, and Malahide (c.150 acres). Getting on well with the Russell-Cruise family of Swords, his first landlords, he benefits from a favourable leasehold arrangement on their demesne in the early 1860s. The farm is mostly in tillage, though Kettle also raises some fat cattle and Clydesdale horses, which he eventually sells to Guinness’s.

Kettle first enters politics in 1867, when he disagrees with John Paul Byrne of Dublin Corporation in public and in print over the right of graziers to state aid during an outbreak of cattle distemper. In 1868, he joins an agricultural reform group initiated by Isaac Butt. He becomes friendly with Butt and later claims to have converted him to support tenant-right. His memoirs, which are somewhat egocentric, contain a number of such questionable claims. It is, however, the case that he habitually writes up, for his own use, cogent summaries of the direction of current political tendencies, which sometimes become useful confidential briefs for Butt and later Charles Stewart Parnell. He is among the published list of subscribers to the Home Rule League in July 1870.

In 1872, disappointed by the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870, Kettle organises a Tenants’ Defence Association (TDA) in north County Dublin, soon sensing the need for a central body to coordinate the grievances of similar groups around the country. The Dublin TDA effectively acts as this central body, under his guidance as honorary secretary. At the 1874 United Kingdom general election in Ireland, the Dublin TDA decides to challenge the electoral control of certain corporation interests in County Dublin. Kettle secures the cautious approval of Cardinal Paul Cullen for any candidate supporting the principle of denominational education. He is also one of a deputation to ask Parnell to fight the constituency, which the latter loses. He becomes closely acquainted with Parnell, who frequently attends Dublin TDA meetings after his election for Meath in April 1875.

Taking a sombre view of the threat of famine in the west of Ireland after evidence of crop failure appears in early summer 1879, Kettle calls a conference of TDA delegates at the European Hotel in Bolton Street, Dublin, in late May. After a heated debate in which a proposal for a rent strike is greatly modified, Parnell comes to seek Kettle’s advice on whether to become involved in the evolving land agitation in County Mayo. Kettle urges him to go to the Westport meeting set for June 8, 1879, and claims later to have stressed in passing that “if you keep in the open you can scarcely go too far or be too extreme on the land question.” If the incident is correctly recounted, this is a most important statement, which virtually defines Parnell’s oratorical strategy throughout the land war. In October 1879, Kettle agrees to merge the TDA with a new Irish National Land League, set up at a meeting in the Imperial Hotel, Dublin, chaired by Kettle. As honorary secretary of the Land League, Kettle frankly admits that he is able to attend meetings without “the necessity of working.” His attendance is, however, among the most regular of all League officers, with him taking part in 73 of 107 meetings scheduled between December 1879 and October 1881.

In March 1880, Kettle disputes Michael Davitt‘s reluctance to use League funds in the general election. He canvasses vigorously together with Parnell in Kildare, Carlow, and Wicklow and is later pressed by his party leader into standing for election in County Cork, though aware that the local tenant movement has already prepared their own candidates. His association with Parnell antagonises the catholic hierarchy in Munster, who issues a condemnation of his candidacy. The hurly-burly of this election creates the persistent impression that Kettle is anti-clerical in politics, and he is defeated by 151 votes.

On a train journey to Ballinasloe in early April 1880, Kettle confides to Parnell his idea that land purchase can be facilitated by the recovery of tax allegedly charged in excess on Ireland by the British government since the act of union. At League meetings in June and July 1880, he advances his “catastrophist” plan: to cease attempts to prevent the development of an irresistible crisis among the Irish smallholding population, by diverting the application of League funds from general relief solely to the aid of evicted tenants, who might be temporarily housed “encamped like gypsies and the land lying idle,” in the belief that the British government will thereby be compelled to introduce radical remedial legislation. Smallholders do not have enough faith in either League or parliamentary politicians to listen.

At a meeting of the League executive in London and in Paris, before and after Davitt’s arrest on February 3, 1881, Kettle presents his plan that the parliamentary party should, if faced with coercive legislation, withdraw from Westminster, “concentrate” in Ireland, and call a general rent strike. Republicans on the League executive continually find themselves embarrassed by Kettle’s radical calls to action motivated solely by the project of agrarian reform. Parnell is later supposed to have lamented party failure to execute the plan at this juncture.

Kettle is arrested in June 1881 for calling for a collective refusal of rent. After two weeks in Naas jail he is transferred to Kilmainham Gaol, where in October he is, with some misgivings, one of the signatories to the No Rent Manifesto. Discharged from Kilmainham in late December 1881 owing to poor health, he returns principally to work on the family farm for most of the 1880s, though he claims to have formulated a draft solution for the plight of the agricultural labourer and “pushed it through” in correspondence with Parnell. He reemerges in 1890 to defend Parnell after the divorce scandal breaks. Attempting to establish a new ”centre” party independent of extreme Catholic and Protestant interests, he stands for election as a Parnellite at the 1891 County Carlow by-election, where he is comprehensively beaten, having endured weeks of insinuating harangues by Tim Healy, and raucous mob insults to the din of tin kettles bashed by women and children at meetings around the county. He is intermittently involved in County Dublin politics in the 1890s and 1900s and maintains a brusque correspondence on matters of the day in the national press.

Kettle dies on September 22, 1916, at his residence, St. Margaret’s, County Dublin, anguished by the death on September 9 of his brilliant son, Tom Kettle, near the village of Ginchy during the Battle of the Somme. He is buried at St. Colmcille’s cemetery, Swords.

Kettle marries Margaret McCourt, daughter of Laurence McCourt of Newtown, St. Margaret’s, County Dublin, farmer and agricultural commodity factor. They have five sons and six daughters.




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Birth of Timothy McCarthy Downing, Solicitor & Politician

Timothy McCarthy Downing, solicitor and an Irish Liberal Party and Home Rule League politician, is born at Kenmare, County Kerry, on May 11, 1814.

Downing is the second son of Eugene Downing, a local merchant, and his wife, Helena, daughter of Timothy McCarthy of Kilfadamore, County Kerry. They have two other sons and two daughters. He is apprenticed in 1830 to his elder brother, Francis Henry, who practises as a solicitor at Killarney. Once admitted as a solicitor himself in 1836, he moves to Skibbereen, County Cork, where he practises until the mid-1860s, making from his practice a large fortune. By the mid-1870s he owns 4,067 acres in Cork and Kerry valued at £1,413.

Downing is prominent locally in public affairs, supporting the repeal campaign of Daniel O’Connell and the temperance campaign of Fr. Theobald Mathew. He is the first chairman of Skibbereen town commissioners, from 1862 to 1879. He later helps James Stephens and Michael Doheny escape to France in 1849. After Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa and other members of the Phoenix National and Literary Society are arrested on December 5, 1858, he acts as their solicitor. His chief clerk, Mortimer Moynahan, a member of the society, unwittingly takes on as an assistant a man who proves to be an informer.

Downing involves himself in the National Association of Ireland, the political pressure group formed by the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen, and succeeds in getting tenant-right added to its demands in March 1865. He is elected as one of the two MPs for County Cork on November 30, 1868, and is reelected without a contest on February 5, 1874. Nominally a liberal, he draws his main support from the Catholic bishops and most of the parish clergy and, more significantly, from the tenant farmer class. The farmers’ interests he vigorously pursues in parliament and outside.

After the passing of William Ewart Gladstone‘s first land act, Downing plays a prominent part in the formation of the Home Rule League under the leadership of Isaac Butt. He is always a moderate on the home-rule issue – he opposes the pledging of home-rule MPs always to act together and later the obstructive tactics of fellow home-rulers Joseph Gillis Biggar and Charles Stewart Parnell. He is one of the nine members of the standing committee of Butt’s Irish Parliamentary Party (1874–79) and proves a stalwart of Butt particularly in disputes with Parnell. It is he who draws to the attention of the House of Commons the condition of tenants on the Buckley estate in the foothills of the Galtee Mountains at Skeheenarinky in County Tipperary in March 1877. In Butt’s absence Downing introduces an Irish land tenure bill on February 6, 1878, which is, however, quickly defeated.

Downing dies January 10, 1879, at his residence, Prospect House, Skibbereen, a deputy lieutenant of County Cork. The cortège that follows his body to the Old Caheragh Graveyard, Skibbereen, for burial is said to be four miles long. In Emmet Larkin‘s judgement, “it was not altogether unlikely, if he had survived, that he would have eventually succeeded Butt as chairman of the Irish party.”

In 1837, Downing marries Jane, youngest daughter of Daniel McCarthy of Ave Hill, Dromore, County Cork, and with her has four sons and three daughters. His younger brother, Washington, is a parliamentary reporter and later the Rome correspondent for The Daily News of London, and husband of Mary McCarthy Downing.

(From: “Downing, Timothy McCarthy” by C.J. Woods, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Birth of Charles Kickham, Novelist, Poet, Journalist & Revolutionary

Charles Joseph Kickham, Irish revolutionary, novelist, poet, journalist and one of the most prominent members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), is born at Mullinahone, County Tipperary, on May 9, 1828.

Kickham’s father, John Kickham, is the proprietor of the principal drapery in the locality and is held in high esteem for his patriotic spirit. His mother, Anne O’Mahony, is related to the Fenian leader John O’Mahony. He grows up largely deaf and almost blind, the result of an explosion with a powder flask when he is thirteen. He is educated locally, where it is intended that he study for the medical profession. During his boyhood the campaign for a repeal of the Acts of Union 1800 between Great Britain and Ireland is at its height, and he soon becomes versed in its arguments and is inspired by its principles. He often hears the issues discussed in his father’s shop and at home amongst all his friends and acquaintances.

From a young age Kickham is imbued with these patriotic ideals. He becomes acquainted with the teaching of the Young Irelanders through their newspaper The Nation from its foundation in October 1842. His father read the paper aloud every week for the family. Like all the young people of the time, and a great many of the old ones, his sympathies are with the Young Irelanders on their secession from the Repeal Association.

When he is 22 years old, Kickham contributes The Harvest Moon sung to the air of “The Young May Moon,” to The Nation on August 17, 1850. Other verses are to follow, but the finest of his poems according to A. M. O’Sullivan, appear in other journals. Rory of the Hill, The Irish Peasant Girl, and Home Longings, better known as Slievenamon, are published in the Celt. The First Felon appears in the Irishman. Patrick Sheehan, the story of an old soldier, is published in the Kilkenny Journal, and becomes very popular as an anti-recruiting song.

Kickham begins to write for a number of papers, including The Nation, but also the Celt, the Irishman, the Shamrock, and becomes one of the leading writers of The Irish People, the Fenian newspaper, in which many of his poems appear. His writings are signed using his initials, his full name, or the pseudonyms, “Slievenamon” and “Momonia.”

Kickham is the leading member of the Confederation Club in Mullinahone, which he is instrumental in founding. When the revolutionary spirit begins to grip the people in 1848, he turns out with a freshly made pike to join William Smith O’Brien and John Blake Dillon when they arrive in Mullinahone in July 1848. On hearing of the progress of O’Brien through the country, he sets to work manufacturing pikes and is in the forge when news reaches him that the leaders are looking for him. It is here that he meets James Stephens for the first time. At O’Brien’s request, he rings the chapel bell to summon the people and before midnight a Brigade has answered the summons. He later writes a detailed account about this period which brings his connection with the attempted Rising of 1848 to a close.

After the failed 1848 uprising at Ballingarry, Kickham has to hide for some time, as a result of the part he had played in rousing the people of his native village to action. When the excitement has subsided, he returns to his father’s house and resumes his interests in the sports of fishing and fowling and spends much of his time in literary pursuits. Some of the authors in which he is well versed are Alfred Tennyson and Charles Dickens and he greatly admires George Eliot, and after William Shakespeare, is Robert Burns.

In the autumn of 1857, a messenger arrives from New York with a message for James Stephens from members of the Emmet Monument Association, calling on him to get up an organization in Ireland. On December 23, Stephens dispatches Joseph Denieffe to the United States with his reply and outlines his conditions and his requirements from the organisation in America. Denieffe returnd on March 17, 1858, with the acceptance of Stephens’ terms and £80. That evening the Irish Republican Brotherhood commences. Those present in Langan’s, lathe-maker and timber merchant, 16 Lombard Street, for that first meeting are Stephens, Kickham, Thomas Clarke Luby, Peter Langan, Denieffe and Garrett O’Shaughnessy. Later it includes members of the Phoenix National and Literary Society, which is formed in 1856 by Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa in Skibbereen, County Cork.

In mid-1863, Stephens informs his colleagues that he wishes to start a newspaper, with financial aid from O’Mahony and the Fenian Brotherhood in America. The offices are established at 12 Parliament Street, almost at the gates of Dublin Castle. The first issue of The Irish People appears on November 28, 1863. The staff of the paper along with Kickham are Luby and Denis Dowling Mulcahy as the editorial staff, O’Donovan Rossa and James O’Connor in charge of the business office, with John Haltigan being the printer. John O’Leary is brought from London to take charge in the role of Editor. Shortly after the establishment of the paper, Stephens departs on an America tour, and to attend to organizational matters. Before leaving, he entrusts to Luby a document containing secret resolutions on the Committee of Organization or Executive of the IRB. Though Luby intimates its existence to O’Leary, he does not inform Kickham as there seems no necessity. This document later forms the basis of the prosecution against the staff of The Irish People.

Kickham’s first contribution to The Irish People, entitled Leaves from a Journal, appears in the third issue and is based on a journal he kept on his way to America in 1863. This article leaves no doubt as to his literary capacity according to O’Leary. It falls to Kickham, as a good Catholic, to tackle the priests, though not exclusively with articles such as “Two Sets of Principles,” a rebuff to the doctrines laid down by Lord Carlisle, and “A Retrospect,” dealing with the tenant-right movement chiefly but also the events of the recent past and their bearing on the present. Kickham articulates the attitude held by the IRB in relation to priests, or more particularly in politics.

On July 15, 1865, American-made plans for a rising in Ireland are discovered when the emissary loses them at Kingstown railway station. They find their way to Dublin Castle and to Superintendent Daniel Ryan, head of G Division. Ryan has an informer within the offices of The Irish People named Pierce Nagle. He supplies Ryan with an “action this year” message on its way to the IRB unit in Tipperary. With this information, Ryan raids the offices of The Irish People on September 15, followed by the arrests of O’Leary, Luby, and O’Donovan Rossa. Kickham is caught after a month on the run. Stephens is also caught but with the support of Fenian prison warders John J. Breslin and Daniel Byrne is less than a fortnight in Richmond Bridewell when he vanishes and escapes to France. The last issue of The Irish People is dated September 16, 1865.

On November 11, 1865, Kickham is convicted of treason. Judge William Keogh, with many expressions of sympathy for the prisoner, and many compliments in reference to his intellectual attainments, sentences him to fourteen years’ penal servitude. The prisoners’ refusal to disown their opposition to British rule in any way, even when facing charges of life-imprisonment, earn them the nickname of “the bold Fenian men.” Kickham spends time from 1866 until his release in the Woking Convict Invalid Prison.

Kickham is given a free pardon from Queen Victoria on February 24, 1869, because of ill-health, and upon his release he is made Chairman of the Supreme Council of the IRB and the unchallenged leader of the reorganized movement. He is an effective orator and chairman of meetings despite his physical handicaps. He wears an ear trumpet and can only read when he holds books or papers within a few inches of his eyes. For many years he carries on conversations by means of the deaf and dumb alphabet.

Kickham is the author of three well-known stories, dealing sympathetically with Irish life and manners and the simple faith, the joys and sorrows, the quaint customs and the insuppressible humour of the peasantry. Knocknagow is deemed one of the finest tales of peasant life ever written. Sally Cavanagh is a touching story illustrating the evils of landlordism and emigration. For the Old Land deals with the fortunes of a small farmer’s family.

Kickham dies on August 22, 1882, at the house of James O’Connor, a former member of the IRB and afterward MP for West Wicklow, 2 Montpelier Place, Blackrock, Dublin, where he had been living for many years, and had been cared for by the poet Rose Kavanagh. He is buried in Mullinahone, County Tipperary.


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Birth of William Sharman Crawford, Irish Politician

William Sharman Crawford, Irish politician with liberal and radical views, is born William Sharman on September 3, 1780 in at Moira Castle in County Down.

Sharman is the eldest son of Colonel William Sharman, for many years a member of the Parliament of Ireland for Lisburn, who dies in 1803 leaving him large estates. In 1805 he marries a wealthy heiress, Mabel Fridiswid Crawford, whose surname and arms he adds to his own.

Sharman Crawford supports Catholic Emancipation and the rights of tenants. He is also a member of the landed gentry. He is High Sheriff of Down for 1811. He is a member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom for Dundalk in 1835–37 and for Rochdale in 1841–52. He greatly increases the prosperity of the tenants on his large estates by extending and confirming the Ulster custom of tenant-right. The main objective of his long parliamentary career is to give legal effect to this right and extend it to other parts of Ireland.

In 1848 with James MacKnight, editor of the liberal Londonderry Standard, Sharman Crawford forms the Ulster Tenant Right Association which is supported by a group of radical Presbyterian ministers. He also supports MacKnight in forming, with Charles Gavan Duffy, editor of the Young Ireland newspaper The Nation, the all-Ireland Tenant Right League.

Sharman Crawford is the father of James Sharman Crawford, member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom for Down, (1874-78), Arthur Sharman Crawford, unsuccessful candidate for Down in 1884 and John Sharman Crawford, unsuccessful candidate for Down in 1880. His daughter is Mabel Sharman Crawford, adventurer, feminist and writer.

Sharman Crawford dies unexpectedly and peacefully at Crawfordsburn, County Down on October 17, 1861. He is buried in the family vault at Kilmore, County Down, where there is a monumental inscription. A great stone obelisk is erected in his memory on a hill at Rademon Estate, near Crossgar, County Down.


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Founding of the Tenant Right League

The Tenant Right League, an organisation which aims to secure reforms in the Irish land system, is founded in Dublin on August 9, 1850, at a meeting attended by representatives of the Tenant Protection Societies. Formed by Charles Gavan Duffy and Frederick Lucas, the League unites for a time Protestant and Catholic tenants, Duffy calling his movement The League of North and South.

The political background to the movement is the Encumbered Estates Act and the resultant change in land ownership at landlord level. In the North of Ireland, Protestant and Presbyterian ministers fear that the new landlords will destroy the “Ulster custom” of tenancy, which compensates tenants for any improvement undertaken. Concurrently, in the South of Ireland politically minded young Catholic priests are agitating for the adoption there of the Ulster custom as a measure of reform.

Support for the League initially comes from the Ulster Tenant Right Association led by William Sharman Crawford. The support is short-lived because of the involvement of Catholic clergymen from the south. As a constitutional movement, the League seeks to secure the adoption and enforcement of the Three Fs, namely fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale. All of these would aid Irish tenant farms, all of whom lack them.

For the larger tenant farmers fixity of tenure is the priority. On the other hand, the league never has the support of smaller tenants, whose prime concern is fair rents. The founders strive to establish a parliamentary party of Irish members who will oppose any government not prepared to grant “Tenant-right” also known as the Ulster Custom.

The Tenant Right League meets with considerable success under its national organiser, John Martin. It has the support of the surviving members of the Repeal Association in the British House of Commons as well as a number of English Radicals. It is agreed, all around, that a Land Act embodying the three F’s would be a real gain. In the 1852 general election, some fifty Tenant Right candidates, including Gavan Duffy, Lucas and John Sadleir, are returned to parliament, where they sit as the Independent Irish Party.

The League’s success is short lived and is ultimately destroyed and weakened when a number of prominent members break away and established the Catholic Defence Association. Supporters of the league are also intimidated by hostile landlords. The most serious blows to its success come when Lucas decides to take his complaint about the Archbishop of Dublin Paul Cullen to Rome, which alienates clerical support. Lucas dies in October 1855 shortly after the failure of his mission, a month later Gavan Duffy emigrates to Australia.

The League finally dissolves in 1859, and the Independent Irish Party disappears by 1860. The demand for tenants’ rights is however continued by Bishop Thomas Nulty of County Meath and taken up again as a popular cause by the Irish National Land League in 1879, when the “Three Fs” are anchored in the Land Law (Ireland) Act 1881, previously pursued rigorously by Michael Davitt.