‘Lord Wallscourt of Ardfry (1797-1849): an early Irish socialist’
published in Journal of Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, vol. 57, 2005, pp. 90-112.
Two estimations of Joseph Henry Blake, the third Lord Wallscourt, of Ardfry, near Oranmore, are not easy to reconcile. The first was from his obituary in an Irish nationalist periodical; the second was from the family of his estranged wife:
…Lord Wallscourt was a kind landlord, a sincere philanthropist, and a true patriot… His private life was as estimable as his public life. And
the tenants who grew prosperous beneath his gentle rule will long lament the day that took from amongst them the good Lord Wallscourt.[1]
…A man of exceptional strength, and a well-known boxer, he would get half-crazed at times and very violent. He liked walking about the
house with no clothes on, and, at his wife’s suggestion, carried a cowbell in his hand when in this state of nudity, so that the maidservants
had warning of his approach…[2]
One might conclude that the public man was very different from the private man — that he was the proverbial street angel and house devil. But that would be to over-simplify, for the fact was that Wallscourt brought his ideas home with him. Egalitarian ideas were not as welcome in landed families as they were in advanced political circles, however, and his attempts to apply them in his personal life were not appreciated. His notorious rages did not help matters and, ultimately, differences between Lord and Lady Wallscourt resulted in separation and in custody suits in Chancery. In this acrimonious context, a benevolent disposition was overshadowed by unreasonable and eccentric behaviour. Thus, the emphasis in reference works on the aristocracy on Wallscourt’s bad temper and on his penchant for nudity.[3] This last, the so called ‘fresh-air bath’, was one of the health fads adopted by radicals of the era, but it was open to misinterpretation, and it was entered by his wife’s lawyers as evidence of either madness or of sexual deviancy.[4]
Nor were Wallscourt’s efforts outside the domestic sphere always as well received as his Irishman obituarist suggested, for there are indications that his tenants were not as keen on being ‘improved’ as their landlord was keen to improve them.[5]. And if his entry in The Complete Peerage was unflattering, his pioneering socialist experiments won him notice in other circles. The solitary reference to Co. Galway in James Connolly’s classic Labour in Irish History (1910), to give one example, was to Lord Wallscourt’s utopian ‘community’ at Ardfry.
*
Joseph Henry Blake was born on 2 June 1797, the eldest son of Henry James Blake, of Prospect Hill in Ballynacourty parish, and Ann French of Galway and Annaghdown. His childhood home was the agent’s house on the Ardfry estate, separated by a few hundred yards of water from Ardfry House itself. Joseph Henry’s father had grown up in Ardfry House, but, as the youngest son, could not expect to inherit much, so he earned a living as his brother’s agent / estate manager, while also serving as a colonel in the Galway Militia. According to local tradition, Ardfry tenants formed part of the force that he led towards Castlebar during the 1798 rebellion.[6]
The Blakes of Ardfry[7] were established in the area since the early 17th century. Evidently they were regarded by their tenants as good landlords, and even during the periods when the head of the family was Protestant, they were not found to be unfriendly towards Catholicism.[8]
Joseph Henry Blake (1765-1803), son of the then Blake of Ardfry, conformed to the Church of Ireland, and was thus able to represent Co. Galway in the Irish House of Commons from 1790. As an MP (alongside his good friend, Richard ‘Humanity’ Martin), he actively supported the Union, for which the family was rewarded with a peerage. In other circumstances, the title would have been have been bestowed upon the head of the family, but since he was a Roman Catholic this was not possible, so Joseph Henry Blake was himself elevated to the Lords.[9]
This first Lord Wallscourt had no male heir, so he secured a provision granting succession to the male heirs of his father. Following his death in 1803, at the age of 37, there was a hiatus until he could be succeeded by his young nephew, also Joseph Henry Blake, on the death of the old man in 1806. The second lord survived only a few months after achieving his majority, and the title passed to his 18-year-old cousin, the tenth Blake of Ardfry and the man who interests us here.[10] It was through an improbable combination of heirless marriages and early deaths —including that of his own father at 37— that he became the third Lord Wallscourt.
Joseph Henry was a serving soldier when the news of his succession reached him in 1816. Having attended Eton for a few years, he had joined the 85th Regiment of Foot in January 1813 at the age of 15, and had been promoted from ensign to lieutenant a year later. His subsequent service included a period as aide-de-camp to the general commanding the forces in the northern district of Ireland. Evidently, he did little soldiering after coming into his inheritance, for he went on half-pay early in 1819, soon after he had reached 21.[11]
With the Wallscourt title came the Ardfry estate of 2,834 statute acres. Except for 619 acres in the townland of Newgrove (otherwise Carrowboy), near Kilreekil, some twenty miles away, the property was all within one ring fence in the immediate vicinity of Ardfry House —encompassing the townlands of Derry, Kilcaimin, Seafield, Treenlaur, Marshalspark, Ardfry, Garraun Upper, Garraun Lower, Prospect Hill, Ballinacloghy, Mweeloon and Tawin East.[12] The house, which was ten miles from Galway by road but only about three miles by sea, was built in the 1770s and incorporated a late 17th century house. Ten years after it was built, visitor Dorothy Herbert considered it to be ‘a beautiful place’.[13] According to a later but rather more informative description, it was ‘a well-built and roomy edifice with suitable offices, a well walled-in garden and tastefully laid out pleasure grounds’, located within ‘a small but beautiful and picturesque demesne, well planted with forest and ornamental timber.’ Ardfry was considered to be ‘a very well circumstanced estate, the greater part of the land being of excellent quality, the tenantry respectable and solvent’. There were about a hundred tenant families altogether on this coastal property (but also some under-tenant and labouring families), and the majority of them maintained their solvency by combining farming with fishing and kelp-burning.[14]
According to a tradition in the family of the future Lady Wallscourt, the new master of Ardfry set about celebrating his good luck to the extent that he ‘squandered most of his fortune’ in a few years. If another Lock family tradition —that he was a ‘well-known boxer’— was true, it must have been in the early years of his lordship that he made his reputation. And evidently, his fractious nature also found another outlet, for there is a reference to a duel between Wallscourt and the Earl of Harborough in 1818.[15]
But the period of celebration, if such there was, was short, for his legacy began to crumble in Wallscourt’s hands just as he came of age. First, debt threatened to overwhelm him; then, the legality of the succession to the title came under scrutiny:
Did not the title cease and determine upon the death of Joseph Henry the first Lord Wallscourt, his father Joseph Blake having survived him,
there could be no male heirs of his said father existing at the time the first Lord died? Or is it consistent with the principles of law that a title
can be held in suspense for such an eventual contingency as is recited in the present case, viz, that the first Lord died in 1803 and that the
remainder limited by the patent did not come into existence until some years afterwards?[16]
In fact, these questions were evaded for a century. It was the succession of the second lord that was in doubt, but a ruling to the effect that the title ceased in 1803 would have meant that there could have been no further Lords Wallscourt. Lest an attempt to do so provoke a full examination of the matter, the third lord never claimed his seat in the House of Lords, and nor did either of his successors.[17]
Evidently, the indebtedness of the estate preceded the accession of the third lord, for in the years around 1795, more than 1,500 acres of the original grant in the Kilreekil area (including the townland of Wallscourt) was offered for sale, and, at around the same time, another part of the property was sold to the Redingtons of Kilcornan.[18]
The annual rental of the remaining land was £3200, a notional figure that depended on the capacity of the tenants to pay. And there were incumbrances that had to be met regardless of actual income. There were family members and retainers who were entitled to income for their lifetimes to an annual total of £800, and there was a further £7000 owing (most of it to relatives). The situation was so serious that the creditors had the estate placed in trust in 1820, with the trustees being required to maximise the income in order to pay meet all obligations. Wallscourt’s allowance under this dispensation was £500 a year.[19]
These were difficult years for Irish tenant farmers, and the trustees had difficulty in meeting their responsibilities. In 1822, they reported that they were doing ‘everything possible for collecting the rents’: in particular, that they had ‘distrained cattle and brought them to sales’. It was their opinion, however, that in the climate of agrarian unrest, ‘no further indiscriminate pressure for arrears can take place without causing a ruinous waste and destruction of property’. They instructed the agent, one Ryan, therefore, ‘to grant such indulgences as he may deem necessary’. Further ‘indulgences’ — including a generalised abatement of 20% of rents — were granted in consequence of the ‘extreme distress’ of 1823.[20]
Deprived of any role in the management of his property, Wallscourt went travelling in Europe. In Malta, he stayed with his aunt, the Countess of Erroll (formerly Elizabeth Jemima Blake of Ardfry), a noted bienfaisant. The Countess took a benign interest in his affairs, and introduced him into the social milieu of émigré aesthetes and aristocrats that was gathering around her second husband, John Hookham Frere. Frere was an important figure, a former Tory politician / strategist and a diplomat, who gained a reputation as a poet and intellectual in retirement. He was by no means a radical himself, but there were radicals in his circle, including exiled southern European nationalists and young Anglophone poets — notably Byron — who were impressed by his experimentation with Italian lyrical forms.[21]
As one of the two trustees that had accepted responsibility for the affairs of Lord Wallscourt,[22] Frere had an interest in bringing an orderly end to the trusteeship, something that was achieved, ultimately, by means of a marital contract with the Lock family. It is not certain that Frere and the Countess planned this outcome, but there can be little doubt that they were responsible for the introduction.
The Locks were a peripatetic family recently settled in Naples. William Lock — ‘always somewhat of a prig’, in one opinion — had a reputation as an artist; his wife and daughter, both Elizabeth, were noted beauties. In Norbury Park, Surrey (the family home until William sold it in 1818), the Locks had been at the centre of an intellectual coterie since the 1790s when William’s parents had sheltered a group of reformist French nobles fleeing the terror. In Norbury, Madame de Staehl’s salon-in-exile was the rendezvous of social theorists and artists, including the agriculturalist Arthur Young and the novelist, Fanny Burney, one of the original ‘bluestockings’. Like his father, William enjoyed the company of intellectuals, and he was well-known among the artists and writers of his own generation.[23]
Later in his life, Wallscourt stated that it was while travelling on the continent that he was first impressed by ‘some of the theories, then much debated, for lifting the labourer into the position of a partner with the capitalist’.[24] He was hardly in a position to do anything about putting any such theories into effect at the time, but the likelihood is that this extended stay in the Mediterranean — for several of his mid-twenties — was very important to his ideological formation. Certainly, a milieu that included the Neapolitan poet, Gabriele Rosetti, then exiled to Malta due to his revolutionary activity in Italy, as well as Byron and (until he was drowned while sailing an experimental craft near Pisa on 8 July 1822) Shelley, (not to mention Mary Shelley, daughter of William Godwin, philosopher of anarchism, and Mary Wollstonecraft, feminism’s founding theorist) was one where advanced social and political ideas were freely debated.
And if the origin of Wallscourt’s interest in radical social reform can plausibly be dated to those years, then so can his interest in sailing, a favourite diversion of the British Mediterranean set.
*
In September 1822, in the British Embassy in Naples, Wallscourt married Elizabeth — or Bessie — Lock. (A poem by Gabriele Rosetti commemorated the event[25]). Barely 18, Bessie was beautiful, vivacious, and headstrong, qualities that were captured a few years later by Lock family friend, Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), the leading portraitist of the age (and an occasional guest at Ardfry). Lawrence showed her ‘in the full radiance of the famous Lock beauty, with large eyes, wild curls, and parted lips, singing as she plays the guitar…’ And in listing her among the beauties of the Georgian era, a contributor to The Times was clearly influenced by Lawrence’s portrayal: ‘the poetical sweetness of Lady Wallscourt, with mind and music breathing from her face’.[26] That there was some disappointment about her choice is clear from the correspondence of relatives: ‘You have heard about Lord Wallscourt? Is it not sad? I am sure Bessie will marry him and so add to the state of pauperism of us all. Aunt Augusta says that she casts her eyes on all sides and sees nothing but mendicity in every branch of the poor family’.[27]
Clearly, Bessie had other attractions, but her dowry of £8000 had the capacity to release Ardfry from the shackles of trusteeship. It took some time — there was a share in a West Indian sugar plantation to be sold, there were the negotiations that granted William Lock a lifetime pension from Ardfry, there was much long-distance haggling — but the creditors agreed to a settlement giving them ten shillings in the pound, and in 1824 the estate passed back under Wallscourt’s control.[28]
In 1825, by which time the couple had two sons, Wallscourt took his bride to Ardfry for the first time. That the house was showing signs of having been uninhabited for several years is clear from Bessie’s description:
The woods and the walks are certainly very pretty and some of the trees very old and remind me of those poor dear old woods at Norbury,
but the house is even in a worse state than I had expected, and you know I was not prepared to find grand chose. The building at a distance
looks very well and is very handsome, but it seems to me impossible anything can be done to it. There is so much to do, repairing and
building, to make it all inhabitable, that I am sure Wallscourt will not attempt it.[29]
Nor was the alternative that Wallscourt had prepared to her taste:
Prospect Hill, the place his father had close to Ardfry, is in very good repair and is very pretty, but a regular cottage and hardly large
enough to hold us, but that is what Wallscourt intended to furnish and go in to. Altho’ it is very pretty in summer, it would be miserable in
cold and wet weather, the offices and most of the bedrooms are detached from the house; the gardens and flowers are very nice there and
the view of Ardfry from its lawn is beautiful.[30]
There was a more substantial vacant house in the neighbourhood, the Athy property at Renville, and it was there that the Wallscourts went to live.
Arriving in summertime, Bessie was agreeably surprised at the social life of the area. Families from inland parts came to bathe, renting lodges or cabins according to their means. With boats in the bay, bathers in the water, and life being lived en plein air, she was reminded of Castellammare, near Naples. There were disadvantages, however, to living on the edge of Europe: ‘None of us know the hour, having no clock and none to be got in this part of the country. All our watches but Wallscourt’s are stopped or wrong… and there is no remedy, no watchmakers, not even in Dublin’.[31]
The couple soon decided to renovate Ardfry. It has been suggested by one authority that they added a ‘few mild gothic touches’ to the house, but a comparison of a sketch from around 1820 with a later photograph tends to indicate otherwise, for the gothic aspect seems more muted in the later picture.[32] Sometime during 1826, the house was brought to a habitable state, although Bessie considered it to be gravely under-furnished. She complained that there was no suitable furniture to be found in Galway and, anyway, that there was no money to spend on furniture. To mark their moving in, a ball was held for servants and tenants. It was all too much for the genteel Bessie:
We had more than eighty assembled in the room next the dining parlour (that is just floored but not yet finished), and in the hall; both very
large and suited to the dreadful stench and heat there was to be. At first they were quite stupid, the men flocking on one side and the
women sticking together on the other side of the room, but the great decorum and silence gave place to the most violent noise and rioting
as they grew merrier, and they danced incessantly to a piper till five. They had enormous suppers of a whole sheep and two or three rounds
of beef, and all went home mad drunk with drinking Henry’s health in ‘the cratur’, as they call whisky.[33]
She danced an English country-dance with her husband, later watching as he danced an Irish jig — ‘very well’ — and as he moved easily among his tenants. Bessie was glad to have the excuse of leaving to take charge of her children, relieving their nurse whom she knew was ‘languishing to be in the midst of it’. This normally bashful girl, Bessie was amused to learn afterwards, had been ‘quite the life of the party… springing and capering about in a most ludicrous way.’ In the morning, the piper was brought to entertain the children, his instrument, Bessie described for her mother: ‘it is exactly like the bagpipes only they don’t blow with their mouth like the Scotch, but have a curious little bellows they carry under their arms’.[34]
*
There were few hints of it in Bessie’s letters to her mother, but this was a period of acute social tension in Ireland. Many in the rising rural population were driven to desperation by land scarcity, by the depression sparked by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and by economic aftershocks of the Act of Union. There were symptoms of popular despair in a number of manifestations of the period: in the activity of agrarian secret societies; in the millenarian cult of Pastorini (which predicted the eminent and bloody end of Protestantism); in the unrealistic hopes vested in the cause of Catholic Emancipation. And Ardfry was not immune to all of this. As has been pointed out, the trustees of the estate were wary of Ribbonism in 1822, while a decade later the unrest that was gripping Co. Clare spilled over into the district.[35] In correspondence with Dublin Castle, Wallscourt and two of his landed neighbours described episodes of violent intimidation. Upon investigation, they had established that the ‘miscreants’ responsible ‘were not Clare people but we much apprehend our own immediate neighbours’[36]
The instinct of most of those in authority was to turn to repression. But not all members of the comfortable classes were happy with this response, and the argument was made that an ameliorative intervention was necessary —in the interests both of justice and of order. It was among people who held these sentiments that the social reformer Robert Owen found a welcome in 1822 and 1823.
The Welsh-born Owen had risen from the modest circumstances of his childhood to be a successful businessman in his twenties. He was not motivated by the accumulation of personal wealth, however, and when he acquired the best equipped spinning mill in Scotland, at New Lanark, he set about improving the quality of life of the families of those who worked there. While working to make New Lanark successful commercially, he ensured that the workers had good pay, healthy living and working conditions, and access to affordable nourishing food. An enlightened educational system, he believed, was the key to a more harmonious future society, so the children of the New Lanark workers were educated according to the liberal principles of the Swiss educationalist, Pestalozzi (Owen would become disenchanted with Pestalozzi, and embrace the diluted Pestalozzianism of Philipp von Fellenberg). With the help of such radical thinkers as William Godwin, Francis Place, and James Mill, Owen refined his ideas, and the fame of New Lanark spread through his exposition of his principles in New Views of Society (1812) and Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark (1816). A properly ordered society, Owen argued, would be composed of lots of New Lanarks, where education and all physical needs of the people could be provided for.[37]
These ideas were a response to the ravages of the industrial revolution in Britain, but could they not be applied in crisis-ridden Ireland? Owen thought that they could, and he spent six months investigating the condition of the country in 1822-23, staying with the wealthy while noting problems and devising solutions. His description of what he found was intended to flatter his target audience of notables:
I saw a nobility and gentry really desirous of ameliorating the condition of those around them, and making sacrifices of time and money in various attempts to accomplish their wishes; and yet so unsuccessful were their efforts, that they deemed it necessary to barricade the houses which they occupied, as though a powerful enemy surrounded their dwellings and threatened a nightly attack.[38]
At a series of public meetings in Dublin —the first in the Rotunda on 18 March 1823 was chaired by the Lord Mayor of Dublin— which were attended, according to the Freeman’s Journal, by ‘a vast assemblage of rank, fashion, intelligence and talent’, he announced his proposals.[39]
Owen sought to persuade the already-privileged to finance the re-ordering of society along the lines he suggested —a naïve endeavour, according to the Marxists who christened him and his co-thinkers the ‘Utopian socialists’. Another influential pioneer of the nascent co-operative movement, William Thompson of Roscarbery, Co. Cork was sceptical about Owen’s faith in the wealthy. He wrote: ‘No high-sounding moral maxims influence or can influence the rich as a body, [although] a few may rise above the impulses of their class’[40].
Thompson himself was one who rose above the impulses of his class. A leading philosopher of his day and a landowner of 1,600 acres, he made plans to transform his estate into a co-operative commune, but died in 1833 before these reached fruition.[41]
John Scott Vandeleur, a Clare landlord and a founder of an Owenite club, the Hibernian Philanthropic Society, was another such. At the time of the Owen visit, he resolved to establish a co-operative community on his estate and, during the following years, set about rearranging tenancies on his property in such a way as to facilitate this. He had not yet completed his arrangements when his agent was assassinated by agrarian secret society militants in April 1831. The tragedy persuaded Vandeleur of the urgency of ameliorative measures and he invited a Manchester Owenite, E.T. Craig, to establish a model community on part of his estate at Ralahine, near Newmarket-on-Fergus. Craig arrived in September 1831 to take charge of 618 acres and of 52 residents of the estate —7 married couples, 21 single men, 5 single women, and 12 juveniles.[42]
Thirty-odd miles north of Ralahine, Lord Wallscourt was preoccupied with matters of his own —estate management, agrarian unrest, fishery disputes, the proliferation of shebeens.[43] That he was interested in novel approaches to these mundane problems is indicated by his visit to Ralahine in 1832 or 1833.
*
At Ralahine, Wallscourt found a functioning co-operative where the members shared all returns (after Vandaleur had deducted his generous rent). It was a growing community where ‘labour notes’ were the currency; where people worked harmoniously and diligently —and without any overseers; where there was a school for the children. The most modern farm machinery was in use, without any objection from the Luddist agrarian underground; prohibitions on alcohol and gambling were accepted by most; domestic tasks and child-rearing were carried out communally. Wallscourt was shown around by E.T. Craig, who had adapted Robert Owen’s ideas to Clare circumstance, and who insisted that his role was that of facilitator and emphatically not that of manager or agent.[44]
Wallscourt was impressed, ‘so much gratified’, according to Craig, that he sent his overseer to study the system in detail. Equipped with the Ralahine agreement and regulations, and with ‘such explanations as seemed necessary’, the man returned to Ardfry, where Wallscourt set aside a hundred acres for a small socialist experiment of his own. It would seem that the contact continued for a period —certainly, in noting that Wallscourt ‘adapted some portion of our plans, and with marked success’, Craig seemed well-disposed towards him.[45]
Craig’s remarks raises questions —what was the ‘portion’ of the Ralahine system that was adopted and where were the hundred acres located?— to which the answers are tentative. If Ralahine precedent was followed, the ‘plan’ involved the labourers rather than the tenants of the estate, and it was applied in an untenanted part of the estate, most likely on the demesne lands near the house, described in 1823 as ‘containing 96 acres of excellent Meadow, Pasture and Tillage, with some sea-weed’.[46] As to the nature of the experiment itself, it must have been limited in character. The relatively small size was a limitation in itself —if Ralahine started with fifty-odd people on six hundred-odd acres, could there have been more than twenty on a hundred acres at Ardfry? And in the apparent absence of a model village of any sort, the ‘plan’ must have been applied only to the working lives of the participants. Wallscourt had strong views about the exploitation of workers —‘the labourer and the artizan should be ensured a fair share of the produce of their labour, and every exertion should be made to give them that’[47]— so one presumes that under the system at Ardfry, fair shares were guaranteed. And Wallscourt was satisfied with his own share, as he indicated in a letter to E.T. Craig:
It answers much beyond my hopes, inasmuch as it completely identifies the workman with the success of the farm, besides giving me full liberty to travel on the continent for a year at a time; and upon my return I have always found that the farm had prospered more than when I was present.[48]
*
In common with Owen and Craig, Wallscourt recognised the importance of education and immediately following the inauguration of the national education system, he made several efforts to establish a national school at Gurrane on his estate. Evidently, there were difficulties in doing so. He was an advocate of agricultural schools also, and eventually had one established in the late 1840s.[49] In the meantime, he sponsored the education of a number of boys at institutions in England and elsewhere. He sent several to Switzerland, to Philipp von Fellenberg who ran a school where farm training was combined with a good general education and where students of different social classes were encouraged to mix (This was where the children of Robert Owen were educated).[50] Wallscourt had some educational theories of his own also, which he applied in the education of his daughters, Elizabeth Frederica and Elizabeth Nina. There was a governess in the household, but their father took a hand in teaching the girls himself. Believing in the equality of the sexes, he taught them subjects normally taken only by boys —classical Greek, for example— and believing in social equality, he had them learn how to perform the household tasks that were the domain of servants in houses like Ardfry.[51]
*
If the Ralahine-inspired project was directed at the labourers on his property, Wallscourt was also concerned —‘anxious beyond measure’, according to one who spoke with him[52]— about the welfare of his tenants and with the condition of the estate generally.
Certainly, he assisted his tenants in their ongoing difficulties with the fishermen of the Claddagh, who considered themselves to be ‘guardians of Galway Bay’ —an ancient by-law of the city that gave guild status to their collective supported the claim. Among the rights and duties of guardianship was the setting of the dates of the fishing seasons, and the Claddaghmen enforced these dates by destroying fish caught out of season and by assaulting the persons or damaging the boats of those involved.[53] The Claddagh was the only full-time fishing community on the bay, and doubtless the wisdom of generations of fishermen in these matters had some ecological basis. But for part time fishermen, such as those fishing out of Ballynacourty, the regulations were a mere nuisance that prevented them going to sea at quiet agricultural times. For those of an ‘improving’ disposition, including Wallscourt, the Claddaghmen were lazy and superstitious, and their guild was the maritime equivalent of an agrarian secret society. On occasion, therefore, he summoned the coastguard and the navy to protect the small Ballynacourty fleet, and when no other protection was available, he issued firearms to his sea-going tenants.[54]
And he tried, without much success, to improve the quality of the housing on the estate. At one point, he had a two-storey slate-roofed house built as a model, intending to build others when its superiority to the thatched cabins of the neighbourhood had been demonstrated. His tenants, however, refused to live in it on the grounds, allegedly, that ‘it would be mighty cold, and my Lord would be expecting me to keep it too clean’.[55] That their landlord (in the professional opinion of a senior judge) was ‘a man that loved to proceed methodically according to his own rules, and extremely resented the least interference with these rules which he thought ought strictly to be adhered to’[56] was no encouragement to any family pondering the benefits of a slated roof. Eventually, after five years, newly-weds took up the offer, remarking that it was ‘better than nothing at all’[57] Some time afterwards, Wallscourt took a London Times journalist, Thomas Campbell Foster, to visit it:
I went to see the family in this cottage. An English peasant’s wife would have been proud to have it as clean as hands could make it. In one room a pile of turf was in the corner, the floor was filthy, the woman was squatted with her children before the fire, and a pig in the middle of them, whilst another room at the back of the house, where the turf and the pig (if it must dwell in the house) might have been put, was empty. The man (and it was the best feature I saw) seemed ashamed of his dirty disorderly wife, when Lord Wallscourt, in a tone of mortification, pointed out these things, for he kicked out the pig.[58]
For Foster, this proved that the Irish peasantry ‘must not only be taught civilised habits but forced into them’. ‘Example alone will not do.’ he went on, ‘nor will teaching alone do’. The journalist’s conclusion raised hackles in Galway: was not his newspaper a vehicle for anti-Irish prejudice; did he think he could understand a community by spending a day or two observing it and by speaking to a few self-serving individuals; did he think that Lord Wallscourt gave good example to his tenants in matters of cleanliness and domestic order?[59]
Wallscourt’s chief concern was with agriculture, and he carried out a considerable amount of drainage, receiving mention as one of the leading ‘improvers’ in the county.[60] Foster, the Times journalist, however, reported that he was disappointed in the response of the Ardfry tenants. There were many resources freely available to them —‘abundance of fish of every kind, oysters and mussels, manure, sea-weed, calcerous sea sand, marl, peat, and black mud sea deposit’‑ but they refused to ‘exert themselves beyond their half-acre of potatoes’. Those who had tenancies greater than was necessary for self-suffiency in potatoes were inclined to sub-let rather than to work the land themselves. In this way, without any labour, they might get three times as much per acre as they paid in rent to their landlord.[61]
Several months later, in another context, Wallscourt himself described life on the estate rather differently. His own immediate tenants (as opposed, presumably, to their sub-tenants), he wrote, were ‘well-to-do’. He cultivated ‘four large farms of 200 or 250 acres each’, he continued, so there was plenty of employment available for all.[62] This latter version was consistent with the observations of two other contemporaries, and was probably closer to actuality than Foster’s version. It was Foster’s story of the pig in the two-storey-house that provoked the editor of the Galway Mercury and an anonymous ‘Advocate of the Poor’ in Oranmore to put pen to paper. The arrangements on the Ardfry estate, evidently, enjoyed some local notoriety, as did the man responsible for them.
According to the editor, the Ardfry tenants endured a ‘thousand annoyances’ from their landlord. This formulation may not have adequately described their situation, however, for it was alleged that they were subject to such controls that their status was hardly that of tenants at all. Only two or three on the estate had leases, it was stated, and the others had their holdings changed arbitrarily from year to year. Rents were very high (if they were, perhaps it was so as to discourage sub-letting), and were paid fully up to date, with no hanging gale as was usual in other estates in the area. Moreover, there were regulations as to what use tenants might make of their land, and an overseer employed to ensure that these were observed. ‘Green cropping’ was the order of the day, but the output from it was not sufficient to feed families, and the farmers were left with little enough time left to tend and harvest their potatoes. Allegedly, tenants wishing to marry were obliged to first seek permission from Wallscourt, and were heavily fined if they proceeded without it.[63]
The evidence is not conclusive about the objective, but it is clear that Wallscourt had introduced substantial changes on the estate —and not necessarily popular changes. It is probable (given later developments) that these were preparatory to greater change. Vandeleur had spent almost a decade reararranging tenancies and waiting for leases to expire before initiating the Ralahine co-operative community.[64] Was the insecurity of the Ardfry tenants and the interference in their lives part of a plan designed to transform the estate into something similar to Ralahine?
*
Wallscourt’s public profile was low during the two decades following his return to Ardfry. His title (doubts about its validity notwithstanding) would have guaranteed him a place at the top table of any Galway society event he cared to attend, but only when a sense of duty compelled did he claim this privilege. The impression is that he was socially awkward, that he was careless about his appearance, and that he disliked both frivolity and ceremony.
With regard to sailing, however, he was prepared to make an exception. His interest in the sport pre-dated his return to Ardfry in 1825, and he maintained his interest —there is a reference to his participation in a Cork Regatta, for example.[65] Recreational sailing was an unfamiliar spectacle in the west of Ireland (a Connaught Journal report of an early event mentioned the participation of ‘yacths’ and ‘yatches’), and an 1831 contest in the bay between the Northern and Western Yacht Clubs attracted great attention. Two years later, on 15 August, 1833, the first Galway Bay regatta was held. Wallscourt was commodore of the event, which attracted an ‘almost incredible’ number of spectators, who ‘lined the shore along Forthill, Renmore and Fairhill’.[66]
Regattas were elite events, but it became the practice to include races for working seafarers. The programme for the first Galway regatta gave rather more prominence to this element of the event than was usual, with rowing competitions between teams of coastguards and races for ‘first class fishermens’ hookers’. The inclusion of the latter class, doubtless, was attributable to the democratic sympathies of the commodore, and to his wish to develop the maritime skills of Galway bay fishermen. Subsequent regattas gave even greater prominence to races for fishermen. In 1839, for example, they had top billing, with significant prizes sponsored by Lord Wallscourt –£5 for first in the large sailing boat class; £1 for first in the four-oared herring boat class. When the annual Galway Bay regatta lapsed in the 1840s, an Ardfry regatta replaced it for a time.[67]
*
Wallscourt’s personal life was marked by difficulty and by tragedy. One could speculate about the effect of the loss of his father when he was 14, and of teenage years spent entirely in institutions. Certainly, he grew into an emotionally scarred adult, impetuous and subject to uncontrollable tantrums. In the circumstances, marriage to a self-centred 18-year-old heiress was going to present challenges to both parties, and the indications are that the relationship was troubled from the beginning.[68]
Further tragedy in the late 1820s added to the strain. The death in India in 1827 of 24-year-old Errol Blake, his cherished younger brother, was followed in 1828 by the death of his eldest son, five-year-old Henry Joseph, and, in 1829, by the death of his second son, four-year-old William Richard. Wallscourt’s beloved boys died in England, and he held his wife —and, more particularly, her family— responsible for their loss.[69]
Thereafter, Lord and Lady Wallscourt led largely separate lives, but there were reconciliations. During one of these, in the winter of 1840, a male heir was conceived.[70] In naming the boy Errol Augustus, Wallscourt remembered his late brother and his late aunt, the countess. The parents, however, were estranged again soon afterwards.
The estrangement became a public scandal in the mid-1840s, when Lady Wallscourt sought a divorce, ‘by reasons of cruelty and adultery’ and brought a suit for custody of the children ‘on the ground of such conduct on the part of his lordship as rendered him an improper person to have charge of them’.[71] Wallscourt’s alleged improprieties included a sexual relationship with his daughters’ governess at Ardfry, public nudity, and undue severity with his children. It was also charged he had ‘compelled’ his daughters ‘to do things which were incompatible with the tenderness of their sex’ and that he had shown cruelty towards them —his requirement that they learn to perform ‘menial offices’ inappropriate to their station in life was cited— and it was disputed whether Elizabeth Frederica’s journal, which chronicled a carefree and adventurous childhood at Ardfry, was written under her father’s direction.[72] For their part, according to a journalist’s account, Wallscourt’s legal representatives introduced evidence ‘which either impeded the veracity of some of the witnesses, or endeavoured to explain away their statements and put a different construction on them than that wished to be conveyed by the evidence’.[73] There was also a counter-charge, which revealed the extent of the social and philosophical gulf between Wallscourt and his wife’s family:
That the habits of the said George Lock and Elizabeth his wife, and of the said Lady Wallscourt are those of luxury and complete self-indulgence and the house of the said William Lock is the resort of persons whose manners and conversation render them unfit associates for young ladies and the said Lady Wallscourt is from beliefs and disposition totally unfit to have the care of a young child.[74]
In the event, Lady Wallscourt’s custody suit failed.
*
The public airing of his personal affairs coincided with the arrival in Ireland of phytophthora infestans and the beginning of the Famine. That catastrophe compelled Wallscourt to set aside his distaste for public affairs and he took his place on relief committees and on the Galway Board of Guardians, where he was a critic of ‘Whig political economy’ and of the operation of the poor law system. He became critical also of his fellow guardians, who, he said, seemed ‘little disposed to transact the business for the discharge of which they were elected’. Proposing the dissolution of the Galway Board of Guardians —something that was done when Boards showed themselves incapable of carrying out their functions effectively— he argued that the business of poor relief was best left to professionals and, anyway, that individual guardians would be better occupied in attending to the starving on their own properties.[75]
In January 1847, Wallscourt’s was among the prominent names attached to a resolution calling on Irish legislators —in both Lords and Commons— to set aside their political differences and to act as a body in safeguarding Irish interests during the Famine crisis. Later in the year he associated himself with the campaign for tenant right.[76] On those political questions that he addressed in this period, Wallscourt’s views coincided with the views of those in the Young Ireland milieu, and he was identified as a likely recruit to that cause. Early in 1848, he was persuaded to join the Irish Confederation. Charles Gavan Duffy was impressed to meet a man who ‘though a peer was a democrat’, who ‘had quite divested himself of class prejudices’, and who was applying the ‘principle of partnership to the cultivation of his estate’. Noting that Wallscourt was ‘a man of good capacity and generous disposition’ and that he had considerable military experience, Duffy expected that he would take a leading role in the anticipated Irish revolution. He declined, however. ‘When it comes to blows,’ he told Duffy, ‘undisciplined peasants will never be got to stand shoulder-to-shoulder’.[77]
He was not opposed to revolution in principle, however, for he welcomed the Paris insurrection of 1848. The Paris events had great resonance in Ireland, and the Irish Confederation held a celebratory public rally in Dublin, with Wallscourt presiding. (One suspects —the Confederation’s democratic protestations, notwithstanding— that he was summoned to the chair by virtue of his title). In his opening remarks, he revealed something of his political outlook:
I have never before attended a public meeting and I hope you will excuse me any mistake I might make. All my life I have held aloof from politics, believing politicians to be great rogues. I have kept myself free from any party because I believe that party was the great destruction of Ireland. But I joined the Confederation because I saw that it started on the principle of taking no money from the poor and that those belonging to it would not take place or pension from any government. Therefore, I began to hope that there was some hope for Ireland. I trust that the Confederation and everyone who wished well to Ireland will at once see the necessity of imitating the resolution taken in France for the organisation of labour —the true and honest organisation of labour— for the purpose of securing to the artizans and labourers what they are entitled to out of the produce of their toil. Till that was done, I will laugh at tenant right, landlord right, bishop right and every other sort of right.[78]
That the speech made a favourable impression on the gathering is clear from subsequent references to Wallscourt in the republican press: here was a man who ‘ardently desired the liberation of Ireland’, who ‘sympathised with the cause of liberty beneath every sun’, who admired ‘the men who died behind the barricades in the cause of true, not Lamartine, Republicanism’.[79] Such was his stature in Young Ireland circles during the early months of 1848 that he was regarded as an obvious candidate for membership of a revolutionary Irish government. Buoyed by events on the continent, the Nation published a faux-historical account of a successful Irish revolution, under the heading ‘Dublin: First Week of Liberty’. A successful insurrection was described, and the members of the revolutionary administration were listed. The responsibilities allocated to Wallscourt were analogous to those of Louis Blanc in the French provisional government:
The Commission of Internal Trade sits at the Royal Exchange. Mr Harrison, the President of the [Dublin] trades and Lord Wallscourt, the advocate of the organisation of labour, have been appointed to take charge of this inquiry. Several merchants and mechanics have been examined by the Commissioners. It is said that female labour will be the subject of a second commission, and an illustrious poetess is named for this duty.[80]
Of course, no revolutionary Irish government would win power in 1848, and the only significant task undertaken by Wallscourt for the Confederation was to join one of its deputations to revolutionary Paris.[81] But even as he was consorting with radicals and revolutionaries, his contacts with the ruling establishment were not broken. There was correspondence with Dublin Castle (in particular, with Under Secretary Thomas Redington, landlord of Kilcornan which adjoined Ardfry), complaining about the unsettled state of the district, and giving notice of the steps that had been taken in response.[82] Just as he had previously armed his sea-going tenants to enable them to defend themselves against the Claddagh fishermen, Wallscourt now swore in eleven of his employees and tenants as special constables, giving them ‘the right’, and presumably the means, ‘to protect themselves from these Clare fellows (as they call them) and also the right to refuse them lodgings’. Wallscourt went on:
I shall be glad to know if government has any objections to my getting forty or fifty more sworn in for I believe it is the only way to check the growing fear of these nightly visitors and to establish a conviction in the minds of the peasantry that they have a right to resist the threat and intimidations of the disaffected who may endeavour to compel them to join in the general reign of terror.[83]
Whatever else the correspondence reveals, it indicates that Wallscourt trusted his tenants.
*
With regard to his property, Wallscourt’s plans were coming closer to fruition. During 1847, he procured the services of Thomas Skilling, an ‘excellent and very intelligent agriculturalist’, according to one who worked with him.[84] Since 1838, Skilling had been the superintendent of the National Model Farm in Glasnevin, the training centre for teachers in agricultural national schools, running the place for the Education Commissioners in exchange for the free labour of the students. Retiring from Glasnevin in 1847, when the Commissioners wished to take a more direct role, he accepted the position of estate manager at Ardfry. The author of The Science and Practice of Agriculture and the Farmer’s Ready Reckoner, Skilling had been involved in both farming and education since leaving the Royal Navy at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Somewhat unfashionably, his lifelong preoccupation was to find the best combination of activities to maximise the returns of the smallholder.[85]
In the terrible year of ‘black 47’, Skilling set about putting some of his ideas into practice at Ardfry. He was a strong believer in spade cultivation, and with the help of £200 loan from a Quaker Charity, the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends, he devoted 50 Irish acres of the estate to a tillage project employing labourers and tenants of Ardfry and neighbouring estates.[86] He described the scheme for the Central Relief Committee:
You may be assured however that the money you sent for the fifty acres has done an immensity of good already, in employing the idle, teaching them how to cultivate. All the important and valuable green crops and consider the quantity of human food that these fifty acres will produce and but for your grant, must have lain comparatively idle. I say without fear of contradiction that your £200 will do more real good than any £10,000 of the public money that has been squandered during the last two years in any part of the country.[87]
Skilling regarded the Ardfry scheme (and one similar in Ballina) as model relief initiatives:
Is it not possible that your committee, your excellent and judicious friends, can do something to advise and enlighten our governors and legislature on such subjects, and get them to lay out even a small portion of the public money as you have done, which will so admirably tend to employ and feed the people.[88]
If ‘valuable green crops’ were introduced in Ardfry, the established mainstay was not neglected for it was reported that the only disease-free potatoes in the vicinity of Galway in the autumn of 1848 were those grown by Thomas Skilling at Ardfry.[89] (From this, one should not conclude that the estate was immune to the Famine. Hardship was reported —especially among the under-tenants— although it would seem to have been less pronounced than it was in other estates in the vicinity of Oranmore.[90])
The Quakers regarded the spade labour scheme as a significant success, and were keen to extend its scale. While it was repeated in 1848-49 —and the Quaker money advanced was repaid in full— Skilling stated that he could not devote any more acres to the project due of the ‘uncommonly bad weather’, the worst in his memory. He did undertake one other task for the Quakers, however, which was to distribute ‘a large quantity of green crop seeds …among the small farmers and cottiers over a large district of country, say the radius of a circle of eight to nine miles’.[91]
Skilling continued to develop his interest in agricultural education, and, with the support of the Commissioners of National Education, an Ardfry Agricultural College was established, which advertised for pupils in London’s Times during 1848. A limited number of free pupils –‘clever young men possessed of a fair share of literary knowledge’‑ were offered apprenticeships for terms of three to five years, at the end of which they would be fit for positions as ‘stewards, agents, agriculturalists, and agricultural teachers’.[92]
Meanwhile, Skilling and Wallscourt continued to be preoccupied with their longer-term plans for the estate.
There is little firm information about the nature of these plans, but two visitors to Ardfry described some of the results. For the rationalist writer and economist, Harriet Martineau, Ardfry was a secular Eden —‘the one piece of sound prosperity’ in the vicinity of Galway: ‘
Across one arm of the bay, there are woods; and when your boat approaches the beach there, you see gay gardens, productive orchards, rows of stacked corn and hay; and across another inlet, more stacks, another orchard, verdant pastures, a pretty farm house, some splendid stock…’[93]
The agriculturalist, James Caird, who visited soon after the scheme that produced these results had been suspended, provided some details about it. Unfortunately, these were rather cursory. Caird described the Ardfry scheme as ‘a copartnery of landlord and tenant …in which landlord and tenant supplied respectively the capital and skill, and mutually shared the profits and loss’. His brief outline of the ‘copartnery’ suggests, however, that the tenant partners were not tenant farmers in the generally understood sense. Indeed, the impression is that the tenancy arrangements of 1845 had evolved considerably. Virtually the entire estate —1500 acres of arable land, according to Caird— was worked as a single farm under Skilling’s management.[94] An agreement set out the division of the returns:
Whichever party supplied the capital for stocking and working the farm, was first to receive 5 per cent before any division of the proceeds was made. The whole proceeds remaining were to be divided into three parts, two of which went to Mr Skilling to pay labour and superintendence, and one to Lord Wallscourt for the use of the land.[95]
From the limited information available, it would seem that the Ardfry tenants were working co-operatively —but not necessarily by their own choice— in line with a plan suggested by Ralahine, albeit somewhat modified. On the face of it, the arrangement was more favourable to the worker/tenant than Vandeleur’s because the landlord’s share varied according to the fortunes of the farm. According to Caird’s informants, however, neither party found the arrangement to be profitable, although he did acknowledge that the scheme was not in operation long enough for a considered judgement to be made about it.
About one year after his copartnery or co-operative system came into being, Wallscourt’s sudden death put an end to it. While visiting Paris with his son, Erroll Augustus, he contracted cholera and died on 28 May 1849.
The estate went immediately into trust for the 7-year-old fourth Lord Wallscourt, and orthodox property relationships were restored at Ardfry. Harriet Martineau suggested that Lady Wallscourt was to blame for terminating the influence of Thomas Skilling in affairs on the estate.[96] There certainly are indications that her ladyship had little sympathy with her late husband’s ideas, but the nascent experiment could not have long survived without its patron in any case.
POSTSCRIPT
Lady Wallscourt lived on the fringes of fashionable London society for another twenty-eight years, exuding an ever more eccentric aura as she aged, and never forsaking the hairstyles and Regency costumes of her halcyon days.[97]
The fourth Lord Wallscourt came of age in 1862. An exceptionally small man, known to his tenants as ‘the lordeen’, he lived until 1918. He was an innovator in his own way, but in aquaculture rather than in social relations, and he developed an extensive oyster fishery near Ardfry House, which provided considerable employment.[98]
Within months of Wallscourt’s death, Thomas Skilling was appointed Professor of Agriculture at the new Queen’s College, Galway, a position he held until his death in 1865. Evidently, some project work for his university courses was carried out at Ardfry in the early 1850s. And for his only major publication as an academic, a treatise on turnip culture, his few years as agriculturalist to Lord Wallscourt had provided ample opportunity for practical investigation.[99]
[1] The Irishman, 2 June 1849.
[2] Duchess of Sermoneta, The Locks of Norbury: the story of a remarkable family in the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries, London 1940, p.319.
[3] Hon. Vicary Gibbs, ed., The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, extant, extinct or dormant, by G. E. C, London 1910-59, ‘Wallscourt’; Burke’s Irish Family Records, London 1976, ‘Wallscourt’.
[4] National Archives of Ireland, M.3354-64, Papers relating to property at Ardfry, Co. Galway of Lord Wallscourt, and to a lawsuit with Lady Wallscourt: ‘Blake v Lord Wallscourt judgement’.
[5] Thomas Campbell Foster, Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland, London 1846, p.294-95; Galway Mercury, 1, 8 November 1845.
[6] Martin J. Blake, Blake Family Records, London 1905, pp. 179-84; Locks of Norbury, p.321; Brenda Furey, Oranmore-Maree: A History of a Cultural and Social Heritage, Oranmore 1991, pp39-40; Eamon Finn, personal communication. In 1803, the Ardfry community was implicated in the Emmet rebellion when, at the house of the Ardfry gardener, one Perrot, three of the surviving leaders of the rebellion were captured. One of the three was Perrot’s son (Times, 20 October 1803).
[7] The family was granted the estate by James I in 1610. Possibly the most distinguished of them was Sir Richard Blake who was elected speaker of the Catholic assembly known as the Confederation of Kilkenny in 1647. Sir Richard forfeited his estate in the Cromwellian confiscation, but his son was among the well-connected Catholics who reclaimed their family lands during the Restoration period. The process was repeated in the aftermath of the War of the Two Kings, when the family became Protestant in order to recover the property. When it came to pass that there was no male heir to claim the property in the mid-18th century, it was purchased by Joseph Blake of Grange, the closest male relative of the previous occupant, but a Roman Catholic. Joseph was the father of the first Lord Wallscourt, and grandfather of the second and third.
[8] Eamon Finn, personal communication.
[9] Complete Peerage; Shevawn Lynam, Humanity Dick Martin: ‘King of Connemara, 1754-1834, 1989 edn, Dublin, pp.121-22.
[10] Complete Peerage; Blake Family Records, p.183.
[11] The remainder of his military career is quickly outlined: transferred (while still a lieutenant) to 98th Foot in 1824; promoted to captain (unattached) in 1829; retired in 1832 (Complete Peerage; Connaught Journal, 8 April 1824).
[12] National Archives of Ireland, M.3346, Report on the Estate of Lord Wallscourt at Ardfry. Co. Galway, by Messrs Ray and Fitzgerald, Dublin, with map, 1865.
[13] Mark Bence-Jones, Life in an Irish Country House, London 1996, pp.25-30; Louis M. Cullen, ed. Retrospections of Dorothea Herbert, 1770-1806, Dublin 1988, pp.160-61
[14] ‘Report on the Estate of Lord Wallscourt’; Griffith’s Primary Valuation: Parish of Ballynacourty.
[15] Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, Document Number: 00836, Letter from T. K. Bonney to W.H.F. Talbot, 2 December 1818.
[16] Genealogical Office, Ms.150, pp.433-4: ‘Statement of question as to whether the Barony of Wallscourt (Blake) was in fact extinct’, c.1824.
[17] Complete Peerage, p.325n.
[18] Connaught Journal, 1 January 1795; E.W.F. Holt, ‘Notes on the Ordnance Survey Letters relating to the Barony of Dunkellin: iii, Ballynacourty Parish’, JGAHS, vol.vii, no.4, 1911-12, pp.220-21.
[19] National Archives of Ireland, D.20,327-31, ‘Short Abstract of Lord Wallscourt’s Trust Deed’.
[20] National Archives, M.3354-64: ‘Minutes of a meeting of Lord Wallscourt’s creditors, 4 May 1822’, ibid, 18 March 1823.
[21] Sir Bartle Frere, The Works of the Right Honourable John Hookham Frere in Verse and Prose, vol.1: Memoir, 1874 edn, London, passim; Bernard Blackstone, Byron: A Survey, London 1975, pp.277-78; R.D. Waller, The Rosetti Family, 1824-1854, Manchester 1932, pp.1-26.
[22] Abstract of Lord Wallscourt’s Trust Deed
[23] Locks of Norbury, passim; Constance Hill: Juniper Hall: A Rendezvous of Certain Illustrious Personages during the French Revolution Including Alexandre D'Arblay and Fanny Burney, London 1894, pp.52-69. 134-45.
[24] Charles Gavan Duffy, Four Years of Irish History, 1845-49, London 1883, p.535.
[25] Gabriele Rosetti, Per le faustissime nozze del Right Honourable J. Lord Wallscourt e Miss Lock: ode epitalamica, Malta 1822.
[26] Locks of Norbury, p.319; The Times, 16 October 1838.
[27] Locks of Norbury, p.319; Vittoria Colonna, Duchess of Sermoneta, Things Past, London c.1930, pp.17-18.
[28] National Archives of Ireland, D.20,327-31, ‘The Rt Hon. Joseph Lord Wallscourt and Miss Elizabeth Lock: Deed of Declaration of Trust’.
[29] ibid., p.321.
[30] ibid.
[31] ibid., 321-23.
[32] Mark Bence-Jones, A Guide to Irish Country Houses, London, nd, p.9.
[33] Locks of Norbury, p.323
[34] ibid.
[35] James S. Donnelly, Jr, ‘Pastorini and Captain Rock: Millenarianism and Sectarianism in the Rockite Movement of 1821-24’ in Clark & Donnelly, eds, Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780-1914, Manchester 1983, pp.102-39; David Ryan, ‘The Trial and Execution of Anthony Daly’ in Forde, Cassidy, Manzor & Ryan, eds, The District of Loughrea, vol.1: History, 1791-1918, Loughrea 2003, pp.91-107.
[36] National Archives, CSORP, Outrages 1829-31, 1831, no.62, letter of 10 April 1831, signed Wallscourt, George Duignan, and Francis M. Shawe.
[37] Margaret Cole, Robert Owen of New Lanark, London 1953, pp.51-113; Chris Coates, Utopia Britannica: British Utopian Experiments: 1325 to 1945, London 2001, vol.i, pp.72-76; Kate Silber, Pestalozzi:the Man and his Work, London 1960, pp.161-63, 237-39, 283-86.
[38] Freeman’s Journal, 3 March 1823.
[39]. ibid., 19 March 1823. The full texts of all of Owen’s lectures in Dublin were published in the Freeman’s Journal between 19 March and 23 April 1823, and later issued as a pamphlet.
[40] Richard Pankhurst, William Thompson (1775-1833): Pioneer Socialist, 1991 edn, London, p.15. Another sometime supporter, the poet Shelley, mocked Owen’s appeal to the benevolence of the rich as follows: ‘Fear not for the future, weep not for the past. / O could I win your ears to dare be now / Glorious and great, and calm! that ye would cast / Into the dust those symbols of your woe / Purple, and gold, and steel’ (The Revolt of Islam)
[41] Pankhurst, Thompson, pp.109-28; Fintan Lane, The Origins of Modern Irish Socialism, 1881-1896, Cork 1997, pp.6-10, 15-19; James Coombes, Utopia in Glandore: James Redmond Barry and William Thompson, Socialist, Butlerstown 1970, pp.16-22.
[42] Edward Thomas Craig, An Irish Commune: the Experiment at Ralahine, County Clare, 1831-33, 1983 edn, Dublin, passim (This work is an abridgement of Craig’s The Irish Land and Labour Question Illustrated in the History of Ralahine and Co-operative Farming, London 1893); Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘The Owenite Community at Ralahine, County Clare: A Reassessment’, in Irish Economic and Social History Journal, vol.1, pp.36-48; Lane, pp.11-15; David Lee, Ralahine: Land War & the Co-operative, 1981, passim.
[43] National Archives of Ireland: CSORP, Outrages 1829-31, March 1831, no.62, Lord Wallscourt; CSORP 1831, 2799, 3574.
[44] Craig, pp.99-147. After two years the Ralahine experiment came to an end, when John Scott Vandeleur lost the property in a card game and fled. In the ensuing confusion, the Vandeleur family won control over the estate and re-imposed the old order. At the final meeting of the co-operators on 23 November 1833, the following resolution was passed:
‘We the undersigned members of the Ralahine Agricultural and Manufacturing Co-operative have experienced for the last two years contentment, peace and happiness under the arrangements introduced by Mr Vandeleur and Mr Craig. At the commencement we were opposed to the plans proposed by them; but , on their introduction, we found our condition improved, our wants regularly attended to, and our feelings towards each other were at once entirely changed from jealousy, hatred and revenge, to confidence, friendship and forbearance’.
[45] ibid., 130-31.
[46] Connaught Journal, 1 January 1824.
[47] The Nation, 4 March 1848.
[48] Craig, p.131.
[49] The records (National Archives of Ireland, ED2/37, ED2/38) show that applications to the Commissioners of National Education for recognition of male and female schools at Gurrane were submitted on 1833, and that the applications were successful. The schools, located in ‘two miserable cabins’ where ‘books were much wanted’, lost their status as national schools on a few occasions during the 1830s but they continued to operate. A new school building, erected by Wallscourt, opened in 1840. An application in relation to a model agricultural school at Gurrane was received on 26 June 1848. Returns to the Commission of Public Instruction (British Parliamentary Papers, 1835 vol.xxxiv) show that 69 males and 51 females were being taught at Gurrane by James Holmes and Isabella Holmes, with the females receiving instruction in ‘making fishing nets and straw-platting’ as well as in more orthodox subjects. The Holmeses were not considered by inspectors to be very good teachers —‘master not sufficiently attentive’; ‘mistress by no means an efficient teacher— and they had competition in James Fitton who taught ‘diminishing’ numbers (32 males and 10 females) in Gurrane chapel. Fitton’s curriculum included Irish language instruction.
[50] A Scottish Whig in Ireland, 1835-38: the Irish Journals of Robert Graham of Redgorton, Henry Heaney, ed, Dublin 1999, pp.252-53: Cole, pp.88n, 129.
[51] National Archives of Ireland, M.3354-64, ‘Vice Chancellor of England, Blake v Lord Wallscourt Judgement’
[52] Thomas Campbell Foster, Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland, London 1846, p.294
[53] See John Cunningham, ‘A Town Tormented by the Sea’: Galway, 1790-1914, Geography Publications, 2004.
[54] Connaught Journal, 29 August 1833; National Archives of Ireland, Outrage Papers, 1836 11/4580.
[55] Foster, Letters, p.294-95
[56] Blake v Lord Wallscourt Judgement’
[57] Foster, Letters, p.294-95
[58] ibid.
[59] Galway Mercury, 1, 8 November 1845.
[60] The Times, 7 October 1845.
[61] Foster, Letters, p.294-95.
[62] National Archives, Famine Relief Commissioners Correspondence, RLF C3/1/1431, 12 April 1846.
[63] Galway Mercury, 1, 8 November 1845.
[64] Ó Gráda, ‘Owenite Community’, pp.37-43.
[65] Locks of Norbury, p.322; Connaught Journal, 17 August 1837.
[66] Connaught Journal, 31 May 1831, 11 July, 19 August 1833
[67] Cunningham, A town tormented; Galway Advertiser, 31 August 1839. Under the heading ‘Ardfry Regatta’, the Galway Vindicator (29 August 1846) reported as follows: ‘This delightful amusement congregated a very fashionable assemblage of persons on Thursday last on the beach at Renville. The inhabitants of this fashionable little village subscribed for prizes for sail and row boats… In the evening many of the visitors were very hospitably entertained by the gentry residing in the several lodges at Renville. One of the lodges was exclusively set aside for a ball, which was respectable attended; dancing was kept up to a late hour. The excellent band of Messrs Monahan of Loughrea were in attendance’.
[68] Durham University Library, Papers of Miss Elizabeth Copley, GRE/G3/10/1-2, Donegal to Copley, 30 July 1824.
[69] Blake v Wallscourt Judgement; Complete Peerage; re Lieutenant Erroll Blake <http://redcoat.future.easyspace.com/offzdiedb.htm> accessed 4 March 2004
[70] Locks of Norbury, p.360.
[71] The Times, 19 January, 20 July 1846.
[72] Blake v Lord Wallscourt Judgement.
[73] The Times, 20 July 1846.
[74] National Archives of Ireland, M.3354-64, ‘Petition of Lord Wallscourt as to his Infant Children’.
[75] Galway Mercury, 4 December 1847, 4 January 1848.
[76] Galway Mercury, 16 January 1847, Anglo-Celt, 28 January 1848.
[77] Duffy, Four Years, pp.535-37.
[78] The Nation, 4 March 1848. Wallscourt had, in fact, previously taken a part in at least one public meeting. In proposing a resolution at an 1831 meeting in Galway, called for the purpose of ‘petitioning for a reform in the Commons House of Parliament’, he began: ‘Although I have never taken any part in public meetings…’ (Connaught Journal, 7 April 1831)
[79] The Irishman, 2 June 1849.
[80] The Nation, 11 March 1848.
[81] Duffy, Four Years, .535-37.
[82] National Archives of Ireland, Outrage papers, 1848, 11/120
[83] ibid., 11/53.
[84] National Archives of Ireland, Society of Friends Relief of Distress Papers, 2/507/3
[85] Evidence Taken Before the Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Occupation of Land in Ireland (Devon Commission, British Parliamentary Papers 1845, vol.xxi., par.1049; Austin O’Sullivan & Richard Jarrell, ‘Agricultural Education in Ireland’, in Dr Norman MacMillan, ed., Prometheus’s Fire: A History of Scientific and Technical Education in Ireland, n.d, n.p., pp.376-404.
[86] Transactions of the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends During the Famine in Ireland in 1846 and 1847, Dublin 1852, p.88.
[87] Cited by Helen E. Hatton in The Largest Amount of Good: Quaker Relief in Ireland, 1654-1921, Kingston & Montreal, 1993, p.194.
[88] Friends Relief of Distress Papers, 2/507/3.
[89] Papers Relating to Proceedings for the Relief of Distress, and the State of Union Workhouses in Ireland, Seventh Series 1848, British Parliamentary Papers, 1847-48, vol.liv, pp.35-36. Skilling’s method was to plant the potatoes in late autumn rather than in spring. According to a report in the Times, (31 May 1849), he planted them again for the following season: ‘Mr Skilling, the agriculturalist on the Galway estates of Lord Wallscourt promises to supply the market in the course of another week with an abundant stock [of potatoes] at the rate of 1s a stone’.
[90] Galway Mercury, 18 December 1847.
[91] Transactions of the Central Relief Committee, pp.426-27.
[92] The Times, 30 September 1848.
[93] ‘Harriet Martineau, Letters from Ireland, 2001 edn, Glenn Hooper, ed., Dublin, p.77.
[94] James Caird, The Plantation Scheme, or the West of Ireland as a Field for Investment, Edinburgh and London, 1850, pp.56-57
[95] ibid., p.57.
[96] Martineau, op.cit, p.77.
[97] Locks of Norbury.
[98] Eamon Finn, personal communication; Noel P. Wilkins, Ponds, Passes and Parcs: Aqualculture in Victorian Ireland, Dublin 1989, pp.191-93. The journalist and nationalist politician, T.P. O’Connor, who had often admired Ardfry was disappointed to find that the owner of this romantic great house was ‘a tiny little man, sad, deprecatory, almost timid in manner’ (cited in Bence-Jones, Country House, p.30). Charles William Joseph Henry Blake (1875-1920), the fifth lord, did not long survive his father, and there were no further claimants to the Wallscourt title.
[99] Timothy Collins, ‘Melville, Hart and Anderson: Early Teachers of Natural History, 1849-1914’, in Tadhg Foley, ed., From Queen’s College to National University: Essays on the Academic History of QCG/UCG/NUI, Galway, Dublin 1999pp.266-302; Thomas Skilling, The Turnip and its Culture, Dublin 1857.
published in Journal of Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, vol. 57, 2005, pp. 90-112.
Two estimations of Joseph Henry Blake, the third Lord Wallscourt, of Ardfry, near Oranmore, are not easy to reconcile. The first was from his obituary in an Irish nationalist periodical; the second was from the family of his estranged wife:
…Lord Wallscourt was a kind landlord, a sincere philanthropist, and a true patriot… His private life was as estimable as his public life. And
the tenants who grew prosperous beneath his gentle rule will long lament the day that took from amongst them the good Lord Wallscourt.[1]
…A man of exceptional strength, and a well-known boxer, he would get half-crazed at times and very violent. He liked walking about the
house with no clothes on, and, at his wife’s suggestion, carried a cowbell in his hand when in this state of nudity, so that the maidservants
had warning of his approach…[2]
One might conclude that the public man was very different from the private man — that he was the proverbial street angel and house devil. But that would be to over-simplify, for the fact was that Wallscourt brought his ideas home with him. Egalitarian ideas were not as welcome in landed families as they were in advanced political circles, however, and his attempts to apply them in his personal life were not appreciated. His notorious rages did not help matters and, ultimately, differences between Lord and Lady Wallscourt resulted in separation and in custody suits in Chancery. In this acrimonious context, a benevolent disposition was overshadowed by unreasonable and eccentric behaviour. Thus, the emphasis in reference works on the aristocracy on Wallscourt’s bad temper and on his penchant for nudity.[3] This last, the so called ‘fresh-air bath’, was one of the health fads adopted by radicals of the era, but it was open to misinterpretation, and it was entered by his wife’s lawyers as evidence of either madness or of sexual deviancy.[4]
Nor were Wallscourt’s efforts outside the domestic sphere always as well received as his Irishman obituarist suggested, for there are indications that his tenants were not as keen on being ‘improved’ as their landlord was keen to improve them.[5]. And if his entry in The Complete Peerage was unflattering, his pioneering socialist experiments won him notice in other circles. The solitary reference to Co. Galway in James Connolly’s classic Labour in Irish History (1910), to give one example, was to Lord Wallscourt’s utopian ‘community’ at Ardfry.
*
Joseph Henry Blake was born on 2 June 1797, the eldest son of Henry James Blake, of Prospect Hill in Ballynacourty parish, and Ann French of Galway and Annaghdown. His childhood home was the agent’s house on the Ardfry estate, separated by a few hundred yards of water from Ardfry House itself. Joseph Henry’s father had grown up in Ardfry House, but, as the youngest son, could not expect to inherit much, so he earned a living as his brother’s agent / estate manager, while also serving as a colonel in the Galway Militia. According to local tradition, Ardfry tenants formed part of the force that he led towards Castlebar during the 1798 rebellion.[6]
The Blakes of Ardfry[7] were established in the area since the early 17th century. Evidently they were regarded by their tenants as good landlords, and even during the periods when the head of the family was Protestant, they were not found to be unfriendly towards Catholicism.[8]
Joseph Henry Blake (1765-1803), son of the then Blake of Ardfry, conformed to the Church of Ireland, and was thus able to represent Co. Galway in the Irish House of Commons from 1790. As an MP (alongside his good friend, Richard ‘Humanity’ Martin), he actively supported the Union, for which the family was rewarded with a peerage. In other circumstances, the title would have been have been bestowed upon the head of the family, but since he was a Roman Catholic this was not possible, so Joseph Henry Blake was himself elevated to the Lords.[9]
This first Lord Wallscourt had no male heir, so he secured a provision granting succession to the male heirs of his father. Following his death in 1803, at the age of 37, there was a hiatus until he could be succeeded by his young nephew, also Joseph Henry Blake, on the death of the old man in 1806. The second lord survived only a few months after achieving his majority, and the title passed to his 18-year-old cousin, the tenth Blake of Ardfry and the man who interests us here.[10] It was through an improbable combination of heirless marriages and early deaths —including that of his own father at 37— that he became the third Lord Wallscourt.
Joseph Henry was a serving soldier when the news of his succession reached him in 1816. Having attended Eton for a few years, he had joined the 85th Regiment of Foot in January 1813 at the age of 15, and had been promoted from ensign to lieutenant a year later. His subsequent service included a period as aide-de-camp to the general commanding the forces in the northern district of Ireland. Evidently, he did little soldiering after coming into his inheritance, for he went on half-pay early in 1819, soon after he had reached 21.[11]
With the Wallscourt title came the Ardfry estate of 2,834 statute acres. Except for 619 acres in the townland of Newgrove (otherwise Carrowboy), near Kilreekil, some twenty miles away, the property was all within one ring fence in the immediate vicinity of Ardfry House —encompassing the townlands of Derry, Kilcaimin, Seafield, Treenlaur, Marshalspark, Ardfry, Garraun Upper, Garraun Lower, Prospect Hill, Ballinacloghy, Mweeloon and Tawin East.[12] The house, which was ten miles from Galway by road but only about three miles by sea, was built in the 1770s and incorporated a late 17th century house. Ten years after it was built, visitor Dorothy Herbert considered it to be ‘a beautiful place’.[13] According to a later but rather more informative description, it was ‘a well-built and roomy edifice with suitable offices, a well walled-in garden and tastefully laid out pleasure grounds’, located within ‘a small but beautiful and picturesque demesne, well planted with forest and ornamental timber.’ Ardfry was considered to be ‘a very well circumstanced estate, the greater part of the land being of excellent quality, the tenantry respectable and solvent’. There were about a hundred tenant families altogether on this coastal property (but also some under-tenant and labouring families), and the majority of them maintained their solvency by combining farming with fishing and kelp-burning.[14]
According to a tradition in the family of the future Lady Wallscourt, the new master of Ardfry set about celebrating his good luck to the extent that he ‘squandered most of his fortune’ in a few years. If another Lock family tradition —that he was a ‘well-known boxer’— was true, it must have been in the early years of his lordship that he made his reputation. And evidently, his fractious nature also found another outlet, for there is a reference to a duel between Wallscourt and the Earl of Harborough in 1818.[15]
But the period of celebration, if such there was, was short, for his legacy began to crumble in Wallscourt’s hands just as he came of age. First, debt threatened to overwhelm him; then, the legality of the succession to the title came under scrutiny:
Did not the title cease and determine upon the death of Joseph Henry the first Lord Wallscourt, his father Joseph Blake having survived him,
there could be no male heirs of his said father existing at the time the first Lord died? Or is it consistent with the principles of law that a title
can be held in suspense for such an eventual contingency as is recited in the present case, viz, that the first Lord died in 1803 and that the
remainder limited by the patent did not come into existence until some years afterwards?[16]
In fact, these questions were evaded for a century. It was the succession of the second lord that was in doubt, but a ruling to the effect that the title ceased in 1803 would have meant that there could have been no further Lords Wallscourt. Lest an attempt to do so provoke a full examination of the matter, the third lord never claimed his seat in the House of Lords, and nor did either of his successors.[17]
Evidently, the indebtedness of the estate preceded the accession of the third lord, for in the years around 1795, more than 1,500 acres of the original grant in the Kilreekil area (including the townland of Wallscourt) was offered for sale, and, at around the same time, another part of the property was sold to the Redingtons of Kilcornan.[18]
The annual rental of the remaining land was £3200, a notional figure that depended on the capacity of the tenants to pay. And there were incumbrances that had to be met regardless of actual income. There were family members and retainers who were entitled to income for their lifetimes to an annual total of £800, and there was a further £7000 owing (most of it to relatives). The situation was so serious that the creditors had the estate placed in trust in 1820, with the trustees being required to maximise the income in order to pay meet all obligations. Wallscourt’s allowance under this dispensation was £500 a year.[19]
These were difficult years for Irish tenant farmers, and the trustees had difficulty in meeting their responsibilities. In 1822, they reported that they were doing ‘everything possible for collecting the rents’: in particular, that they had ‘distrained cattle and brought them to sales’. It was their opinion, however, that in the climate of agrarian unrest, ‘no further indiscriminate pressure for arrears can take place without causing a ruinous waste and destruction of property’. They instructed the agent, one Ryan, therefore, ‘to grant such indulgences as he may deem necessary’. Further ‘indulgences’ — including a generalised abatement of 20% of rents — were granted in consequence of the ‘extreme distress’ of 1823.[20]
Deprived of any role in the management of his property, Wallscourt went travelling in Europe. In Malta, he stayed with his aunt, the Countess of Erroll (formerly Elizabeth Jemima Blake of Ardfry), a noted bienfaisant. The Countess took a benign interest in his affairs, and introduced him into the social milieu of émigré aesthetes and aristocrats that was gathering around her second husband, John Hookham Frere. Frere was an important figure, a former Tory politician / strategist and a diplomat, who gained a reputation as a poet and intellectual in retirement. He was by no means a radical himself, but there were radicals in his circle, including exiled southern European nationalists and young Anglophone poets — notably Byron — who were impressed by his experimentation with Italian lyrical forms.[21]
As one of the two trustees that had accepted responsibility for the affairs of Lord Wallscourt,[22] Frere had an interest in bringing an orderly end to the trusteeship, something that was achieved, ultimately, by means of a marital contract with the Lock family. It is not certain that Frere and the Countess planned this outcome, but there can be little doubt that they were responsible for the introduction.
The Locks were a peripatetic family recently settled in Naples. William Lock — ‘always somewhat of a prig’, in one opinion — had a reputation as an artist; his wife and daughter, both Elizabeth, were noted beauties. In Norbury Park, Surrey (the family home until William sold it in 1818), the Locks had been at the centre of an intellectual coterie since the 1790s when William’s parents had sheltered a group of reformist French nobles fleeing the terror. In Norbury, Madame de Staehl’s salon-in-exile was the rendezvous of social theorists and artists, including the agriculturalist Arthur Young and the novelist, Fanny Burney, one of the original ‘bluestockings’. Like his father, William enjoyed the company of intellectuals, and he was well-known among the artists and writers of his own generation.[23]
Later in his life, Wallscourt stated that it was while travelling on the continent that he was first impressed by ‘some of the theories, then much debated, for lifting the labourer into the position of a partner with the capitalist’.[24] He was hardly in a position to do anything about putting any such theories into effect at the time, but the likelihood is that this extended stay in the Mediterranean — for several of his mid-twenties — was very important to his ideological formation. Certainly, a milieu that included the Neapolitan poet, Gabriele Rosetti, then exiled to Malta due to his revolutionary activity in Italy, as well as Byron and (until he was drowned while sailing an experimental craft near Pisa on 8 July 1822) Shelley, (not to mention Mary Shelley, daughter of William Godwin, philosopher of anarchism, and Mary Wollstonecraft, feminism’s founding theorist) was one where advanced social and political ideas were freely debated.
And if the origin of Wallscourt’s interest in radical social reform can plausibly be dated to those years, then so can his interest in sailing, a favourite diversion of the British Mediterranean set.
*
In September 1822, in the British Embassy in Naples, Wallscourt married Elizabeth — or Bessie — Lock. (A poem by Gabriele Rosetti commemorated the event[25]). Barely 18, Bessie was beautiful, vivacious, and headstrong, qualities that were captured a few years later by Lock family friend, Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), the leading portraitist of the age (and an occasional guest at Ardfry). Lawrence showed her ‘in the full radiance of the famous Lock beauty, with large eyes, wild curls, and parted lips, singing as she plays the guitar…’ And in listing her among the beauties of the Georgian era, a contributor to The Times was clearly influenced by Lawrence’s portrayal: ‘the poetical sweetness of Lady Wallscourt, with mind and music breathing from her face’.[26] That there was some disappointment about her choice is clear from the correspondence of relatives: ‘You have heard about Lord Wallscourt? Is it not sad? I am sure Bessie will marry him and so add to the state of pauperism of us all. Aunt Augusta says that she casts her eyes on all sides and sees nothing but mendicity in every branch of the poor family’.[27]
Clearly, Bessie had other attractions, but her dowry of £8000 had the capacity to release Ardfry from the shackles of trusteeship. It took some time — there was a share in a West Indian sugar plantation to be sold, there were the negotiations that granted William Lock a lifetime pension from Ardfry, there was much long-distance haggling — but the creditors agreed to a settlement giving them ten shillings in the pound, and in 1824 the estate passed back under Wallscourt’s control.[28]
In 1825, by which time the couple had two sons, Wallscourt took his bride to Ardfry for the first time. That the house was showing signs of having been uninhabited for several years is clear from Bessie’s description:
The woods and the walks are certainly very pretty and some of the trees very old and remind me of those poor dear old woods at Norbury,
but the house is even in a worse state than I had expected, and you know I was not prepared to find grand chose. The building at a distance
looks very well and is very handsome, but it seems to me impossible anything can be done to it. There is so much to do, repairing and
building, to make it all inhabitable, that I am sure Wallscourt will not attempt it.[29]
Nor was the alternative that Wallscourt had prepared to her taste:
Prospect Hill, the place his father had close to Ardfry, is in very good repair and is very pretty, but a regular cottage and hardly large
enough to hold us, but that is what Wallscourt intended to furnish and go in to. Altho’ it is very pretty in summer, it would be miserable in
cold and wet weather, the offices and most of the bedrooms are detached from the house; the gardens and flowers are very nice there and
the view of Ardfry from its lawn is beautiful.[30]
There was a more substantial vacant house in the neighbourhood, the Athy property at Renville, and it was there that the Wallscourts went to live.
Arriving in summertime, Bessie was agreeably surprised at the social life of the area. Families from inland parts came to bathe, renting lodges or cabins according to their means. With boats in the bay, bathers in the water, and life being lived en plein air, she was reminded of Castellammare, near Naples. There were disadvantages, however, to living on the edge of Europe: ‘None of us know the hour, having no clock and none to be got in this part of the country. All our watches but Wallscourt’s are stopped or wrong… and there is no remedy, no watchmakers, not even in Dublin’.[31]
The couple soon decided to renovate Ardfry. It has been suggested by one authority that they added a ‘few mild gothic touches’ to the house, but a comparison of a sketch from around 1820 with a later photograph tends to indicate otherwise, for the gothic aspect seems more muted in the later picture.[32] Sometime during 1826, the house was brought to a habitable state, although Bessie considered it to be gravely under-furnished. She complained that there was no suitable furniture to be found in Galway and, anyway, that there was no money to spend on furniture. To mark their moving in, a ball was held for servants and tenants. It was all too much for the genteel Bessie:
We had more than eighty assembled in the room next the dining parlour (that is just floored but not yet finished), and in the hall; both very
large and suited to the dreadful stench and heat there was to be. At first they were quite stupid, the men flocking on one side and the
women sticking together on the other side of the room, but the great decorum and silence gave place to the most violent noise and rioting
as they grew merrier, and they danced incessantly to a piper till five. They had enormous suppers of a whole sheep and two or three rounds
of beef, and all went home mad drunk with drinking Henry’s health in ‘the cratur’, as they call whisky.[33]
She danced an English country-dance with her husband, later watching as he danced an Irish jig — ‘very well’ — and as he moved easily among his tenants. Bessie was glad to have the excuse of leaving to take charge of her children, relieving their nurse whom she knew was ‘languishing to be in the midst of it’. This normally bashful girl, Bessie was amused to learn afterwards, had been ‘quite the life of the party… springing and capering about in a most ludicrous way.’ In the morning, the piper was brought to entertain the children, his instrument, Bessie described for her mother: ‘it is exactly like the bagpipes only they don’t blow with their mouth like the Scotch, but have a curious little bellows they carry under their arms’.[34]
*
There were few hints of it in Bessie’s letters to her mother, but this was a period of acute social tension in Ireland. Many in the rising rural population were driven to desperation by land scarcity, by the depression sparked by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and by economic aftershocks of the Act of Union. There were symptoms of popular despair in a number of manifestations of the period: in the activity of agrarian secret societies; in the millenarian cult of Pastorini (which predicted the eminent and bloody end of Protestantism); in the unrealistic hopes vested in the cause of Catholic Emancipation. And Ardfry was not immune to all of this. As has been pointed out, the trustees of the estate were wary of Ribbonism in 1822, while a decade later the unrest that was gripping Co. Clare spilled over into the district.[35] In correspondence with Dublin Castle, Wallscourt and two of his landed neighbours described episodes of violent intimidation. Upon investigation, they had established that the ‘miscreants’ responsible ‘were not Clare people but we much apprehend our own immediate neighbours’[36]
The instinct of most of those in authority was to turn to repression. But not all members of the comfortable classes were happy with this response, and the argument was made that an ameliorative intervention was necessary —in the interests both of justice and of order. It was among people who held these sentiments that the social reformer Robert Owen found a welcome in 1822 and 1823.
The Welsh-born Owen had risen from the modest circumstances of his childhood to be a successful businessman in his twenties. He was not motivated by the accumulation of personal wealth, however, and when he acquired the best equipped spinning mill in Scotland, at New Lanark, he set about improving the quality of life of the families of those who worked there. While working to make New Lanark successful commercially, he ensured that the workers had good pay, healthy living and working conditions, and access to affordable nourishing food. An enlightened educational system, he believed, was the key to a more harmonious future society, so the children of the New Lanark workers were educated according to the liberal principles of the Swiss educationalist, Pestalozzi (Owen would become disenchanted with Pestalozzi, and embrace the diluted Pestalozzianism of Philipp von Fellenberg). With the help of such radical thinkers as William Godwin, Francis Place, and James Mill, Owen refined his ideas, and the fame of New Lanark spread through his exposition of his principles in New Views of Society (1812) and Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark (1816). A properly ordered society, Owen argued, would be composed of lots of New Lanarks, where education and all physical needs of the people could be provided for.[37]
These ideas were a response to the ravages of the industrial revolution in Britain, but could they not be applied in crisis-ridden Ireland? Owen thought that they could, and he spent six months investigating the condition of the country in 1822-23, staying with the wealthy while noting problems and devising solutions. His description of what he found was intended to flatter his target audience of notables:
I saw a nobility and gentry really desirous of ameliorating the condition of those around them, and making sacrifices of time and money in various attempts to accomplish their wishes; and yet so unsuccessful were their efforts, that they deemed it necessary to barricade the houses which they occupied, as though a powerful enemy surrounded their dwellings and threatened a nightly attack.[38]
At a series of public meetings in Dublin —the first in the Rotunda on 18 March 1823 was chaired by the Lord Mayor of Dublin— which were attended, according to the Freeman’s Journal, by ‘a vast assemblage of rank, fashion, intelligence and talent’, he announced his proposals.[39]
Owen sought to persuade the already-privileged to finance the re-ordering of society along the lines he suggested —a naïve endeavour, according to the Marxists who christened him and his co-thinkers the ‘Utopian socialists’. Another influential pioneer of the nascent co-operative movement, William Thompson of Roscarbery, Co. Cork was sceptical about Owen’s faith in the wealthy. He wrote: ‘No high-sounding moral maxims influence or can influence the rich as a body, [although] a few may rise above the impulses of their class’[40].
Thompson himself was one who rose above the impulses of his class. A leading philosopher of his day and a landowner of 1,600 acres, he made plans to transform his estate into a co-operative commune, but died in 1833 before these reached fruition.[41]
John Scott Vandeleur, a Clare landlord and a founder of an Owenite club, the Hibernian Philanthropic Society, was another such. At the time of the Owen visit, he resolved to establish a co-operative community on his estate and, during the following years, set about rearranging tenancies on his property in such a way as to facilitate this. He had not yet completed his arrangements when his agent was assassinated by agrarian secret society militants in April 1831. The tragedy persuaded Vandeleur of the urgency of ameliorative measures and he invited a Manchester Owenite, E.T. Craig, to establish a model community on part of his estate at Ralahine, near Newmarket-on-Fergus. Craig arrived in September 1831 to take charge of 618 acres and of 52 residents of the estate —7 married couples, 21 single men, 5 single women, and 12 juveniles.[42]
Thirty-odd miles north of Ralahine, Lord Wallscourt was preoccupied with matters of his own —estate management, agrarian unrest, fishery disputes, the proliferation of shebeens.[43] That he was interested in novel approaches to these mundane problems is indicated by his visit to Ralahine in 1832 or 1833.
*
At Ralahine, Wallscourt found a functioning co-operative where the members shared all returns (after Vandaleur had deducted his generous rent). It was a growing community where ‘labour notes’ were the currency; where people worked harmoniously and diligently —and without any overseers; where there was a school for the children. The most modern farm machinery was in use, without any objection from the Luddist agrarian underground; prohibitions on alcohol and gambling were accepted by most; domestic tasks and child-rearing were carried out communally. Wallscourt was shown around by E.T. Craig, who had adapted Robert Owen’s ideas to Clare circumstance, and who insisted that his role was that of facilitator and emphatically not that of manager or agent.[44]
Wallscourt was impressed, ‘so much gratified’, according to Craig, that he sent his overseer to study the system in detail. Equipped with the Ralahine agreement and regulations, and with ‘such explanations as seemed necessary’, the man returned to Ardfry, where Wallscourt set aside a hundred acres for a small socialist experiment of his own. It would seem that the contact continued for a period —certainly, in noting that Wallscourt ‘adapted some portion of our plans, and with marked success’, Craig seemed well-disposed towards him.[45]
Craig’s remarks raises questions —what was the ‘portion’ of the Ralahine system that was adopted and where were the hundred acres located?— to which the answers are tentative. If Ralahine precedent was followed, the ‘plan’ involved the labourers rather than the tenants of the estate, and it was applied in an untenanted part of the estate, most likely on the demesne lands near the house, described in 1823 as ‘containing 96 acres of excellent Meadow, Pasture and Tillage, with some sea-weed’.[46] As to the nature of the experiment itself, it must have been limited in character. The relatively small size was a limitation in itself —if Ralahine started with fifty-odd people on six hundred-odd acres, could there have been more than twenty on a hundred acres at Ardfry? And in the apparent absence of a model village of any sort, the ‘plan’ must have been applied only to the working lives of the participants. Wallscourt had strong views about the exploitation of workers —‘the labourer and the artizan should be ensured a fair share of the produce of their labour, and every exertion should be made to give them that’[47]— so one presumes that under the system at Ardfry, fair shares were guaranteed. And Wallscourt was satisfied with his own share, as he indicated in a letter to E.T. Craig:
It answers much beyond my hopes, inasmuch as it completely identifies the workman with the success of the farm, besides giving me full liberty to travel on the continent for a year at a time; and upon my return I have always found that the farm had prospered more than when I was present.[48]
*
In common with Owen and Craig, Wallscourt recognised the importance of education and immediately following the inauguration of the national education system, he made several efforts to establish a national school at Gurrane on his estate. Evidently, there were difficulties in doing so. He was an advocate of agricultural schools also, and eventually had one established in the late 1840s.[49] In the meantime, he sponsored the education of a number of boys at institutions in England and elsewhere. He sent several to Switzerland, to Philipp von Fellenberg who ran a school where farm training was combined with a good general education and where students of different social classes were encouraged to mix (This was where the children of Robert Owen were educated).[50] Wallscourt had some educational theories of his own also, which he applied in the education of his daughters, Elizabeth Frederica and Elizabeth Nina. There was a governess in the household, but their father took a hand in teaching the girls himself. Believing in the equality of the sexes, he taught them subjects normally taken only by boys —classical Greek, for example— and believing in social equality, he had them learn how to perform the household tasks that were the domain of servants in houses like Ardfry.[51]
*
If the Ralahine-inspired project was directed at the labourers on his property, Wallscourt was also concerned —‘anxious beyond measure’, according to one who spoke with him[52]— about the welfare of his tenants and with the condition of the estate generally.
Certainly, he assisted his tenants in their ongoing difficulties with the fishermen of the Claddagh, who considered themselves to be ‘guardians of Galway Bay’ —an ancient by-law of the city that gave guild status to their collective supported the claim. Among the rights and duties of guardianship was the setting of the dates of the fishing seasons, and the Claddaghmen enforced these dates by destroying fish caught out of season and by assaulting the persons or damaging the boats of those involved.[53] The Claddagh was the only full-time fishing community on the bay, and doubtless the wisdom of generations of fishermen in these matters had some ecological basis. But for part time fishermen, such as those fishing out of Ballynacourty, the regulations were a mere nuisance that prevented them going to sea at quiet agricultural times. For those of an ‘improving’ disposition, including Wallscourt, the Claddaghmen were lazy and superstitious, and their guild was the maritime equivalent of an agrarian secret society. On occasion, therefore, he summoned the coastguard and the navy to protect the small Ballynacourty fleet, and when no other protection was available, he issued firearms to his sea-going tenants.[54]
And he tried, without much success, to improve the quality of the housing on the estate. At one point, he had a two-storey slate-roofed house built as a model, intending to build others when its superiority to the thatched cabins of the neighbourhood had been demonstrated. His tenants, however, refused to live in it on the grounds, allegedly, that ‘it would be mighty cold, and my Lord would be expecting me to keep it too clean’.[55] That their landlord (in the professional opinion of a senior judge) was ‘a man that loved to proceed methodically according to his own rules, and extremely resented the least interference with these rules which he thought ought strictly to be adhered to’[56] was no encouragement to any family pondering the benefits of a slated roof. Eventually, after five years, newly-weds took up the offer, remarking that it was ‘better than nothing at all’[57] Some time afterwards, Wallscourt took a London Times journalist, Thomas Campbell Foster, to visit it:
I went to see the family in this cottage. An English peasant’s wife would have been proud to have it as clean as hands could make it. In one room a pile of turf was in the corner, the floor was filthy, the woman was squatted with her children before the fire, and a pig in the middle of them, whilst another room at the back of the house, where the turf and the pig (if it must dwell in the house) might have been put, was empty. The man (and it was the best feature I saw) seemed ashamed of his dirty disorderly wife, when Lord Wallscourt, in a tone of mortification, pointed out these things, for he kicked out the pig.[58]
For Foster, this proved that the Irish peasantry ‘must not only be taught civilised habits but forced into them’. ‘Example alone will not do.’ he went on, ‘nor will teaching alone do’. The journalist’s conclusion raised hackles in Galway: was not his newspaper a vehicle for anti-Irish prejudice; did he think he could understand a community by spending a day or two observing it and by speaking to a few self-serving individuals; did he think that Lord Wallscourt gave good example to his tenants in matters of cleanliness and domestic order?[59]
Wallscourt’s chief concern was with agriculture, and he carried out a considerable amount of drainage, receiving mention as one of the leading ‘improvers’ in the county.[60] Foster, the Times journalist, however, reported that he was disappointed in the response of the Ardfry tenants. There were many resources freely available to them —‘abundance of fish of every kind, oysters and mussels, manure, sea-weed, calcerous sea sand, marl, peat, and black mud sea deposit’‑ but they refused to ‘exert themselves beyond their half-acre of potatoes’. Those who had tenancies greater than was necessary for self-suffiency in potatoes were inclined to sub-let rather than to work the land themselves. In this way, without any labour, they might get three times as much per acre as they paid in rent to their landlord.[61]
Several months later, in another context, Wallscourt himself described life on the estate rather differently. His own immediate tenants (as opposed, presumably, to their sub-tenants), he wrote, were ‘well-to-do’. He cultivated ‘four large farms of 200 or 250 acres each’, he continued, so there was plenty of employment available for all.[62] This latter version was consistent with the observations of two other contemporaries, and was probably closer to actuality than Foster’s version. It was Foster’s story of the pig in the two-storey-house that provoked the editor of the Galway Mercury and an anonymous ‘Advocate of the Poor’ in Oranmore to put pen to paper. The arrangements on the Ardfry estate, evidently, enjoyed some local notoriety, as did the man responsible for them.
According to the editor, the Ardfry tenants endured a ‘thousand annoyances’ from their landlord. This formulation may not have adequately described their situation, however, for it was alleged that they were subject to such controls that their status was hardly that of tenants at all. Only two or three on the estate had leases, it was stated, and the others had their holdings changed arbitrarily from year to year. Rents were very high (if they were, perhaps it was so as to discourage sub-letting), and were paid fully up to date, with no hanging gale as was usual in other estates in the area. Moreover, there were regulations as to what use tenants might make of their land, and an overseer employed to ensure that these were observed. ‘Green cropping’ was the order of the day, but the output from it was not sufficient to feed families, and the farmers were left with little enough time left to tend and harvest their potatoes. Allegedly, tenants wishing to marry were obliged to first seek permission from Wallscourt, and were heavily fined if they proceeded without it.[63]
The evidence is not conclusive about the objective, but it is clear that Wallscourt had introduced substantial changes on the estate —and not necessarily popular changes. It is probable (given later developments) that these were preparatory to greater change. Vandeleur had spent almost a decade reararranging tenancies and waiting for leases to expire before initiating the Ralahine co-operative community.[64] Was the insecurity of the Ardfry tenants and the interference in their lives part of a plan designed to transform the estate into something similar to Ralahine?
*
Wallscourt’s public profile was low during the two decades following his return to Ardfry. His title (doubts about its validity notwithstanding) would have guaranteed him a place at the top table of any Galway society event he cared to attend, but only when a sense of duty compelled did he claim this privilege. The impression is that he was socially awkward, that he was careless about his appearance, and that he disliked both frivolity and ceremony.
With regard to sailing, however, he was prepared to make an exception. His interest in the sport pre-dated his return to Ardfry in 1825, and he maintained his interest —there is a reference to his participation in a Cork Regatta, for example.[65] Recreational sailing was an unfamiliar spectacle in the west of Ireland (a Connaught Journal report of an early event mentioned the participation of ‘yacths’ and ‘yatches’), and an 1831 contest in the bay between the Northern and Western Yacht Clubs attracted great attention. Two years later, on 15 August, 1833, the first Galway Bay regatta was held. Wallscourt was commodore of the event, which attracted an ‘almost incredible’ number of spectators, who ‘lined the shore along Forthill, Renmore and Fairhill’.[66]
Regattas were elite events, but it became the practice to include races for working seafarers. The programme for the first Galway regatta gave rather more prominence to this element of the event than was usual, with rowing competitions between teams of coastguards and races for ‘first class fishermens’ hookers’. The inclusion of the latter class, doubtless, was attributable to the democratic sympathies of the commodore, and to his wish to develop the maritime skills of Galway bay fishermen. Subsequent regattas gave even greater prominence to races for fishermen. In 1839, for example, they had top billing, with significant prizes sponsored by Lord Wallscourt –£5 for first in the large sailing boat class; £1 for first in the four-oared herring boat class. When the annual Galway Bay regatta lapsed in the 1840s, an Ardfry regatta replaced it for a time.[67]
*
Wallscourt’s personal life was marked by difficulty and by tragedy. One could speculate about the effect of the loss of his father when he was 14, and of teenage years spent entirely in institutions. Certainly, he grew into an emotionally scarred adult, impetuous and subject to uncontrollable tantrums. In the circumstances, marriage to a self-centred 18-year-old heiress was going to present challenges to both parties, and the indications are that the relationship was troubled from the beginning.[68]
Further tragedy in the late 1820s added to the strain. The death in India in 1827 of 24-year-old Errol Blake, his cherished younger brother, was followed in 1828 by the death of his eldest son, five-year-old Henry Joseph, and, in 1829, by the death of his second son, four-year-old William Richard. Wallscourt’s beloved boys died in England, and he held his wife —and, more particularly, her family— responsible for their loss.[69]
Thereafter, Lord and Lady Wallscourt led largely separate lives, but there were reconciliations. During one of these, in the winter of 1840, a male heir was conceived.[70] In naming the boy Errol Augustus, Wallscourt remembered his late brother and his late aunt, the countess. The parents, however, were estranged again soon afterwards.
The estrangement became a public scandal in the mid-1840s, when Lady Wallscourt sought a divorce, ‘by reasons of cruelty and adultery’ and brought a suit for custody of the children ‘on the ground of such conduct on the part of his lordship as rendered him an improper person to have charge of them’.[71] Wallscourt’s alleged improprieties included a sexual relationship with his daughters’ governess at Ardfry, public nudity, and undue severity with his children. It was also charged he had ‘compelled’ his daughters ‘to do things which were incompatible with the tenderness of their sex’ and that he had shown cruelty towards them —his requirement that they learn to perform ‘menial offices’ inappropriate to their station in life was cited— and it was disputed whether Elizabeth Frederica’s journal, which chronicled a carefree and adventurous childhood at Ardfry, was written under her father’s direction.[72] For their part, according to a journalist’s account, Wallscourt’s legal representatives introduced evidence ‘which either impeded the veracity of some of the witnesses, or endeavoured to explain away their statements and put a different construction on them than that wished to be conveyed by the evidence’.[73] There was also a counter-charge, which revealed the extent of the social and philosophical gulf between Wallscourt and his wife’s family:
That the habits of the said George Lock and Elizabeth his wife, and of the said Lady Wallscourt are those of luxury and complete self-indulgence and the house of the said William Lock is the resort of persons whose manners and conversation render them unfit associates for young ladies and the said Lady Wallscourt is from beliefs and disposition totally unfit to have the care of a young child.[74]
In the event, Lady Wallscourt’s custody suit failed.
*
The public airing of his personal affairs coincided with the arrival in Ireland of phytophthora infestans and the beginning of the Famine. That catastrophe compelled Wallscourt to set aside his distaste for public affairs and he took his place on relief committees and on the Galway Board of Guardians, where he was a critic of ‘Whig political economy’ and of the operation of the poor law system. He became critical also of his fellow guardians, who, he said, seemed ‘little disposed to transact the business for the discharge of which they were elected’. Proposing the dissolution of the Galway Board of Guardians —something that was done when Boards showed themselves incapable of carrying out their functions effectively— he argued that the business of poor relief was best left to professionals and, anyway, that individual guardians would be better occupied in attending to the starving on their own properties.[75]
In January 1847, Wallscourt’s was among the prominent names attached to a resolution calling on Irish legislators —in both Lords and Commons— to set aside their political differences and to act as a body in safeguarding Irish interests during the Famine crisis. Later in the year he associated himself with the campaign for tenant right.[76] On those political questions that he addressed in this period, Wallscourt’s views coincided with the views of those in the Young Ireland milieu, and he was identified as a likely recruit to that cause. Early in 1848, he was persuaded to join the Irish Confederation. Charles Gavan Duffy was impressed to meet a man who ‘though a peer was a democrat’, who ‘had quite divested himself of class prejudices’, and who was applying the ‘principle of partnership to the cultivation of his estate’. Noting that Wallscourt was ‘a man of good capacity and generous disposition’ and that he had considerable military experience, Duffy expected that he would take a leading role in the anticipated Irish revolution. He declined, however. ‘When it comes to blows,’ he told Duffy, ‘undisciplined peasants will never be got to stand shoulder-to-shoulder’.[77]
He was not opposed to revolution in principle, however, for he welcomed the Paris insurrection of 1848. The Paris events had great resonance in Ireland, and the Irish Confederation held a celebratory public rally in Dublin, with Wallscourt presiding. (One suspects —the Confederation’s democratic protestations, notwithstanding— that he was summoned to the chair by virtue of his title). In his opening remarks, he revealed something of his political outlook:
I have never before attended a public meeting and I hope you will excuse me any mistake I might make. All my life I have held aloof from politics, believing politicians to be great rogues. I have kept myself free from any party because I believe that party was the great destruction of Ireland. But I joined the Confederation because I saw that it started on the principle of taking no money from the poor and that those belonging to it would not take place or pension from any government. Therefore, I began to hope that there was some hope for Ireland. I trust that the Confederation and everyone who wished well to Ireland will at once see the necessity of imitating the resolution taken in France for the organisation of labour —the true and honest organisation of labour— for the purpose of securing to the artizans and labourers what they are entitled to out of the produce of their toil. Till that was done, I will laugh at tenant right, landlord right, bishop right and every other sort of right.[78]
That the speech made a favourable impression on the gathering is clear from subsequent references to Wallscourt in the republican press: here was a man who ‘ardently desired the liberation of Ireland’, who ‘sympathised with the cause of liberty beneath every sun’, who admired ‘the men who died behind the barricades in the cause of true, not Lamartine, Republicanism’.[79] Such was his stature in Young Ireland circles during the early months of 1848 that he was regarded as an obvious candidate for membership of a revolutionary Irish government. Buoyed by events on the continent, the Nation published a faux-historical account of a successful Irish revolution, under the heading ‘Dublin: First Week of Liberty’. A successful insurrection was described, and the members of the revolutionary administration were listed. The responsibilities allocated to Wallscourt were analogous to those of Louis Blanc in the French provisional government:
The Commission of Internal Trade sits at the Royal Exchange. Mr Harrison, the President of the [Dublin] trades and Lord Wallscourt, the advocate of the organisation of labour, have been appointed to take charge of this inquiry. Several merchants and mechanics have been examined by the Commissioners. It is said that female labour will be the subject of a second commission, and an illustrious poetess is named for this duty.[80]
Of course, no revolutionary Irish government would win power in 1848, and the only significant task undertaken by Wallscourt for the Confederation was to join one of its deputations to revolutionary Paris.[81] But even as he was consorting with radicals and revolutionaries, his contacts with the ruling establishment were not broken. There was correspondence with Dublin Castle (in particular, with Under Secretary Thomas Redington, landlord of Kilcornan which adjoined Ardfry), complaining about the unsettled state of the district, and giving notice of the steps that had been taken in response.[82] Just as he had previously armed his sea-going tenants to enable them to defend themselves against the Claddagh fishermen, Wallscourt now swore in eleven of his employees and tenants as special constables, giving them ‘the right’, and presumably the means, ‘to protect themselves from these Clare fellows (as they call them) and also the right to refuse them lodgings’. Wallscourt went on:
I shall be glad to know if government has any objections to my getting forty or fifty more sworn in for I believe it is the only way to check the growing fear of these nightly visitors and to establish a conviction in the minds of the peasantry that they have a right to resist the threat and intimidations of the disaffected who may endeavour to compel them to join in the general reign of terror.[83]
Whatever else the correspondence reveals, it indicates that Wallscourt trusted his tenants.
*
With regard to his property, Wallscourt’s plans were coming closer to fruition. During 1847, he procured the services of Thomas Skilling, an ‘excellent and very intelligent agriculturalist’, according to one who worked with him.[84] Since 1838, Skilling had been the superintendent of the National Model Farm in Glasnevin, the training centre for teachers in agricultural national schools, running the place for the Education Commissioners in exchange for the free labour of the students. Retiring from Glasnevin in 1847, when the Commissioners wished to take a more direct role, he accepted the position of estate manager at Ardfry. The author of The Science and Practice of Agriculture and the Farmer’s Ready Reckoner, Skilling had been involved in both farming and education since leaving the Royal Navy at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Somewhat unfashionably, his lifelong preoccupation was to find the best combination of activities to maximise the returns of the smallholder.[85]
In the terrible year of ‘black 47’, Skilling set about putting some of his ideas into practice at Ardfry. He was a strong believer in spade cultivation, and with the help of £200 loan from a Quaker Charity, the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends, he devoted 50 Irish acres of the estate to a tillage project employing labourers and tenants of Ardfry and neighbouring estates.[86] He described the scheme for the Central Relief Committee:
You may be assured however that the money you sent for the fifty acres has done an immensity of good already, in employing the idle, teaching them how to cultivate. All the important and valuable green crops and consider the quantity of human food that these fifty acres will produce and but for your grant, must have lain comparatively idle. I say without fear of contradiction that your £200 will do more real good than any £10,000 of the public money that has been squandered during the last two years in any part of the country.[87]
Skilling regarded the Ardfry scheme (and one similar in Ballina) as model relief initiatives:
Is it not possible that your committee, your excellent and judicious friends, can do something to advise and enlighten our governors and legislature on such subjects, and get them to lay out even a small portion of the public money as you have done, which will so admirably tend to employ and feed the people.[88]
If ‘valuable green crops’ were introduced in Ardfry, the established mainstay was not neglected for it was reported that the only disease-free potatoes in the vicinity of Galway in the autumn of 1848 were those grown by Thomas Skilling at Ardfry.[89] (From this, one should not conclude that the estate was immune to the Famine. Hardship was reported —especially among the under-tenants— although it would seem to have been less pronounced than it was in other estates in the vicinity of Oranmore.[90])
The Quakers regarded the spade labour scheme as a significant success, and were keen to extend its scale. While it was repeated in 1848-49 —and the Quaker money advanced was repaid in full— Skilling stated that he could not devote any more acres to the project due of the ‘uncommonly bad weather’, the worst in his memory. He did undertake one other task for the Quakers, however, which was to distribute ‘a large quantity of green crop seeds …among the small farmers and cottiers over a large district of country, say the radius of a circle of eight to nine miles’.[91]
Skilling continued to develop his interest in agricultural education, and, with the support of the Commissioners of National Education, an Ardfry Agricultural College was established, which advertised for pupils in London’s Times during 1848. A limited number of free pupils –‘clever young men possessed of a fair share of literary knowledge’‑ were offered apprenticeships for terms of three to five years, at the end of which they would be fit for positions as ‘stewards, agents, agriculturalists, and agricultural teachers’.[92]
Meanwhile, Skilling and Wallscourt continued to be preoccupied with their longer-term plans for the estate.
There is little firm information about the nature of these plans, but two visitors to Ardfry described some of the results. For the rationalist writer and economist, Harriet Martineau, Ardfry was a secular Eden —‘the one piece of sound prosperity’ in the vicinity of Galway: ‘
Across one arm of the bay, there are woods; and when your boat approaches the beach there, you see gay gardens, productive orchards, rows of stacked corn and hay; and across another inlet, more stacks, another orchard, verdant pastures, a pretty farm house, some splendid stock…’[93]
The agriculturalist, James Caird, who visited soon after the scheme that produced these results had been suspended, provided some details about it. Unfortunately, these were rather cursory. Caird described the Ardfry scheme as ‘a copartnery of landlord and tenant …in which landlord and tenant supplied respectively the capital and skill, and mutually shared the profits and loss’. His brief outline of the ‘copartnery’ suggests, however, that the tenant partners were not tenant farmers in the generally understood sense. Indeed, the impression is that the tenancy arrangements of 1845 had evolved considerably. Virtually the entire estate —1500 acres of arable land, according to Caird— was worked as a single farm under Skilling’s management.[94] An agreement set out the division of the returns:
Whichever party supplied the capital for stocking and working the farm, was first to receive 5 per cent before any division of the proceeds was made. The whole proceeds remaining were to be divided into three parts, two of which went to Mr Skilling to pay labour and superintendence, and one to Lord Wallscourt for the use of the land.[95]
From the limited information available, it would seem that the Ardfry tenants were working co-operatively —but not necessarily by their own choice— in line with a plan suggested by Ralahine, albeit somewhat modified. On the face of it, the arrangement was more favourable to the worker/tenant than Vandeleur’s because the landlord’s share varied according to the fortunes of the farm. According to Caird’s informants, however, neither party found the arrangement to be profitable, although he did acknowledge that the scheme was not in operation long enough for a considered judgement to be made about it.
About one year after his copartnery or co-operative system came into being, Wallscourt’s sudden death put an end to it. While visiting Paris with his son, Erroll Augustus, he contracted cholera and died on 28 May 1849.
The estate went immediately into trust for the 7-year-old fourth Lord Wallscourt, and orthodox property relationships were restored at Ardfry. Harriet Martineau suggested that Lady Wallscourt was to blame for terminating the influence of Thomas Skilling in affairs on the estate.[96] There certainly are indications that her ladyship had little sympathy with her late husband’s ideas, but the nascent experiment could not have long survived without its patron in any case.
POSTSCRIPT
Lady Wallscourt lived on the fringes of fashionable London society for another twenty-eight years, exuding an ever more eccentric aura as she aged, and never forsaking the hairstyles and Regency costumes of her halcyon days.[97]
The fourth Lord Wallscourt came of age in 1862. An exceptionally small man, known to his tenants as ‘the lordeen’, he lived until 1918. He was an innovator in his own way, but in aquaculture rather than in social relations, and he developed an extensive oyster fishery near Ardfry House, which provided considerable employment.[98]
Within months of Wallscourt’s death, Thomas Skilling was appointed Professor of Agriculture at the new Queen’s College, Galway, a position he held until his death in 1865. Evidently, some project work for his university courses was carried out at Ardfry in the early 1850s. And for his only major publication as an academic, a treatise on turnip culture, his few years as agriculturalist to Lord Wallscourt had provided ample opportunity for practical investigation.[99]
[1] The Irishman, 2 June 1849.
[2] Duchess of Sermoneta, The Locks of Norbury: the story of a remarkable family in the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries, London 1940, p.319.
[3] Hon. Vicary Gibbs, ed., The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, extant, extinct or dormant, by G. E. C, London 1910-59, ‘Wallscourt’; Burke’s Irish Family Records, London 1976, ‘Wallscourt’.
[4] National Archives of Ireland, M.3354-64, Papers relating to property at Ardfry, Co. Galway of Lord Wallscourt, and to a lawsuit with Lady Wallscourt: ‘Blake v Lord Wallscourt judgement’.
[5] Thomas Campbell Foster, Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland, London 1846, p.294-95; Galway Mercury, 1, 8 November 1845.
[6] Martin J. Blake, Blake Family Records, London 1905, pp. 179-84; Locks of Norbury, p.321; Brenda Furey, Oranmore-Maree: A History of a Cultural and Social Heritage, Oranmore 1991, pp39-40; Eamon Finn, personal communication. In 1803, the Ardfry community was implicated in the Emmet rebellion when, at the house of the Ardfry gardener, one Perrot, three of the surviving leaders of the rebellion were captured. One of the three was Perrot’s son (Times, 20 October 1803).
[7] The family was granted the estate by James I in 1610. Possibly the most distinguished of them was Sir Richard Blake who was elected speaker of the Catholic assembly known as the Confederation of Kilkenny in 1647. Sir Richard forfeited his estate in the Cromwellian confiscation, but his son was among the well-connected Catholics who reclaimed their family lands during the Restoration period. The process was repeated in the aftermath of the War of the Two Kings, when the family became Protestant in order to recover the property. When it came to pass that there was no male heir to claim the property in the mid-18th century, it was purchased by Joseph Blake of Grange, the closest male relative of the previous occupant, but a Roman Catholic. Joseph was the father of the first Lord Wallscourt, and grandfather of the second and third.
[8] Eamon Finn, personal communication.
[9] Complete Peerage; Shevawn Lynam, Humanity Dick Martin: ‘King of Connemara, 1754-1834, 1989 edn, Dublin, pp.121-22.
[10] Complete Peerage; Blake Family Records, p.183.
[11] The remainder of his military career is quickly outlined: transferred (while still a lieutenant) to 98th Foot in 1824; promoted to captain (unattached) in 1829; retired in 1832 (Complete Peerage; Connaught Journal, 8 April 1824).
[12] National Archives of Ireland, M.3346, Report on the Estate of Lord Wallscourt at Ardfry. Co. Galway, by Messrs Ray and Fitzgerald, Dublin, with map, 1865.
[13] Mark Bence-Jones, Life in an Irish Country House, London 1996, pp.25-30; Louis M. Cullen, ed. Retrospections of Dorothea Herbert, 1770-1806, Dublin 1988, pp.160-61
[14] ‘Report on the Estate of Lord Wallscourt’; Griffith’s Primary Valuation: Parish of Ballynacourty.
[15] Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, Document Number: 00836, Letter from T. K. Bonney to W.H.F. Talbot, 2 December 1818.
[16] Genealogical Office, Ms.150, pp.433-4: ‘Statement of question as to whether the Barony of Wallscourt (Blake) was in fact extinct’, c.1824.
[17] Complete Peerage, p.325n.
[18] Connaught Journal, 1 January 1795; E.W.F. Holt, ‘Notes on the Ordnance Survey Letters relating to the Barony of Dunkellin: iii, Ballynacourty Parish’, JGAHS, vol.vii, no.4, 1911-12, pp.220-21.
[19] National Archives of Ireland, D.20,327-31, ‘Short Abstract of Lord Wallscourt’s Trust Deed’.
[20] National Archives, M.3354-64: ‘Minutes of a meeting of Lord Wallscourt’s creditors, 4 May 1822’, ibid, 18 March 1823.
[21] Sir Bartle Frere, The Works of the Right Honourable John Hookham Frere in Verse and Prose, vol.1: Memoir, 1874 edn, London, passim; Bernard Blackstone, Byron: A Survey, London 1975, pp.277-78; R.D. Waller, The Rosetti Family, 1824-1854, Manchester 1932, pp.1-26.
[22] Abstract of Lord Wallscourt’s Trust Deed
[23] Locks of Norbury, passim; Constance Hill: Juniper Hall: A Rendezvous of Certain Illustrious Personages during the French Revolution Including Alexandre D'Arblay and Fanny Burney, London 1894, pp.52-69. 134-45.
[24] Charles Gavan Duffy, Four Years of Irish History, 1845-49, London 1883, p.535.
[25] Gabriele Rosetti, Per le faustissime nozze del Right Honourable J. Lord Wallscourt e Miss Lock: ode epitalamica, Malta 1822.
[26] Locks of Norbury, p.319; The Times, 16 October 1838.
[27] Locks of Norbury, p.319; Vittoria Colonna, Duchess of Sermoneta, Things Past, London c.1930, pp.17-18.
[28] National Archives of Ireland, D.20,327-31, ‘The Rt Hon. Joseph Lord Wallscourt and Miss Elizabeth Lock: Deed of Declaration of Trust’.
[29] ibid., p.321.
[30] ibid.
[31] ibid., 321-23.
[32] Mark Bence-Jones, A Guide to Irish Country Houses, London, nd, p.9.
[33] Locks of Norbury, p.323
[34] ibid.
[35] James S. Donnelly, Jr, ‘Pastorini and Captain Rock: Millenarianism and Sectarianism in the Rockite Movement of 1821-24’ in Clark & Donnelly, eds, Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780-1914, Manchester 1983, pp.102-39; David Ryan, ‘The Trial and Execution of Anthony Daly’ in Forde, Cassidy, Manzor & Ryan, eds, The District of Loughrea, vol.1: History, 1791-1918, Loughrea 2003, pp.91-107.
[36] National Archives, CSORP, Outrages 1829-31, 1831, no.62, letter of 10 April 1831, signed Wallscourt, George Duignan, and Francis M. Shawe.
[37] Margaret Cole, Robert Owen of New Lanark, London 1953, pp.51-113; Chris Coates, Utopia Britannica: British Utopian Experiments: 1325 to 1945, London 2001, vol.i, pp.72-76; Kate Silber, Pestalozzi:the Man and his Work, London 1960, pp.161-63, 237-39, 283-86.
[38] Freeman’s Journal, 3 March 1823.
[39]. ibid., 19 March 1823. The full texts of all of Owen’s lectures in Dublin were published in the Freeman’s Journal between 19 March and 23 April 1823, and later issued as a pamphlet.
[40] Richard Pankhurst, William Thompson (1775-1833): Pioneer Socialist, 1991 edn, London, p.15. Another sometime supporter, the poet Shelley, mocked Owen’s appeal to the benevolence of the rich as follows: ‘Fear not for the future, weep not for the past. / O could I win your ears to dare be now / Glorious and great, and calm! that ye would cast / Into the dust those symbols of your woe / Purple, and gold, and steel’ (The Revolt of Islam)
[41] Pankhurst, Thompson, pp.109-28; Fintan Lane, The Origins of Modern Irish Socialism, 1881-1896, Cork 1997, pp.6-10, 15-19; James Coombes, Utopia in Glandore: James Redmond Barry and William Thompson, Socialist, Butlerstown 1970, pp.16-22.
[42] Edward Thomas Craig, An Irish Commune: the Experiment at Ralahine, County Clare, 1831-33, 1983 edn, Dublin, passim (This work is an abridgement of Craig’s The Irish Land and Labour Question Illustrated in the History of Ralahine and Co-operative Farming, London 1893); Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘The Owenite Community at Ralahine, County Clare: A Reassessment’, in Irish Economic and Social History Journal, vol.1, pp.36-48; Lane, pp.11-15; David Lee, Ralahine: Land War & the Co-operative, 1981, passim.
[43] National Archives of Ireland: CSORP, Outrages 1829-31, March 1831, no.62, Lord Wallscourt; CSORP 1831, 2799, 3574.
[44] Craig, pp.99-147. After two years the Ralahine experiment came to an end, when John Scott Vandeleur lost the property in a card game and fled. In the ensuing confusion, the Vandeleur family won control over the estate and re-imposed the old order. At the final meeting of the co-operators on 23 November 1833, the following resolution was passed:
‘We the undersigned members of the Ralahine Agricultural and Manufacturing Co-operative have experienced for the last two years contentment, peace and happiness under the arrangements introduced by Mr Vandeleur and Mr Craig. At the commencement we were opposed to the plans proposed by them; but , on their introduction, we found our condition improved, our wants regularly attended to, and our feelings towards each other were at once entirely changed from jealousy, hatred and revenge, to confidence, friendship and forbearance’.
[45] ibid., 130-31.
[46] Connaught Journal, 1 January 1824.
[47] The Nation, 4 March 1848.
[48] Craig, p.131.
[49] The records (National Archives of Ireland, ED2/37, ED2/38) show that applications to the Commissioners of National Education for recognition of male and female schools at Gurrane were submitted on 1833, and that the applications were successful. The schools, located in ‘two miserable cabins’ where ‘books were much wanted’, lost their status as national schools on a few occasions during the 1830s but they continued to operate. A new school building, erected by Wallscourt, opened in 1840. An application in relation to a model agricultural school at Gurrane was received on 26 June 1848. Returns to the Commission of Public Instruction (British Parliamentary Papers, 1835 vol.xxxiv) show that 69 males and 51 females were being taught at Gurrane by James Holmes and Isabella Holmes, with the females receiving instruction in ‘making fishing nets and straw-platting’ as well as in more orthodox subjects. The Holmeses were not considered by inspectors to be very good teachers —‘master not sufficiently attentive’; ‘mistress by no means an efficient teacher— and they had competition in James Fitton who taught ‘diminishing’ numbers (32 males and 10 females) in Gurrane chapel. Fitton’s curriculum included Irish language instruction.
[50] A Scottish Whig in Ireland, 1835-38: the Irish Journals of Robert Graham of Redgorton, Henry Heaney, ed, Dublin 1999, pp.252-53: Cole, pp.88n, 129.
[51] National Archives of Ireland, M.3354-64, ‘Vice Chancellor of England, Blake v Lord Wallscourt Judgement’
[52] Thomas Campbell Foster, Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland, London 1846, p.294
[53] See John Cunningham, ‘A Town Tormented by the Sea’: Galway, 1790-1914, Geography Publications, 2004.
[54] Connaught Journal, 29 August 1833; National Archives of Ireland, Outrage Papers, 1836 11/4580.
[55] Foster, Letters, p.294-95
[56] Blake v Lord Wallscourt Judgement’
[57] Foster, Letters, p.294-95
[58] ibid.
[59] Galway Mercury, 1, 8 November 1845.
[60] The Times, 7 October 1845.
[61] Foster, Letters, p.294-95.
[62] National Archives, Famine Relief Commissioners Correspondence, RLF C3/1/1431, 12 April 1846.
[63] Galway Mercury, 1, 8 November 1845.
[64] Ó Gráda, ‘Owenite Community’, pp.37-43.
[65] Locks of Norbury, p.322; Connaught Journal, 17 August 1837.
[66] Connaught Journal, 31 May 1831, 11 July, 19 August 1833
[67] Cunningham, A town tormented; Galway Advertiser, 31 August 1839. Under the heading ‘Ardfry Regatta’, the Galway Vindicator (29 August 1846) reported as follows: ‘This delightful amusement congregated a very fashionable assemblage of persons on Thursday last on the beach at Renville. The inhabitants of this fashionable little village subscribed for prizes for sail and row boats… In the evening many of the visitors were very hospitably entertained by the gentry residing in the several lodges at Renville. One of the lodges was exclusively set aside for a ball, which was respectable attended; dancing was kept up to a late hour. The excellent band of Messrs Monahan of Loughrea were in attendance’.
[68] Durham University Library, Papers of Miss Elizabeth Copley, GRE/G3/10/1-2, Donegal to Copley, 30 July 1824.
[69] Blake v Wallscourt Judgement; Complete Peerage; re Lieutenant Erroll Blake <http://redcoat.future.easyspace.com/offzdiedb.htm> accessed 4 March 2004
[70] Locks of Norbury, p.360.
[71] The Times, 19 January, 20 July 1846.
[72] Blake v Lord Wallscourt Judgement.
[73] The Times, 20 July 1846.
[74] National Archives of Ireland, M.3354-64, ‘Petition of Lord Wallscourt as to his Infant Children’.
[75] Galway Mercury, 4 December 1847, 4 January 1848.
[76] Galway Mercury, 16 January 1847, Anglo-Celt, 28 January 1848.
[77] Duffy, Four Years, pp.535-37.
[78] The Nation, 4 March 1848. Wallscourt had, in fact, previously taken a part in at least one public meeting. In proposing a resolution at an 1831 meeting in Galway, called for the purpose of ‘petitioning for a reform in the Commons House of Parliament’, he began: ‘Although I have never taken any part in public meetings…’ (Connaught Journal, 7 April 1831)
[79] The Irishman, 2 June 1849.
[80] The Nation, 11 March 1848.
[81] Duffy, Four Years, .535-37.
[82] National Archives of Ireland, Outrage papers, 1848, 11/120
[83] ibid., 11/53.
[84] National Archives of Ireland, Society of Friends Relief of Distress Papers, 2/507/3
[85] Evidence Taken Before the Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Occupation of Land in Ireland (Devon Commission, British Parliamentary Papers 1845, vol.xxi., par.1049; Austin O’Sullivan & Richard Jarrell, ‘Agricultural Education in Ireland’, in Dr Norman MacMillan, ed., Prometheus’s Fire: A History of Scientific and Technical Education in Ireland, n.d, n.p., pp.376-404.
[86] Transactions of the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends During the Famine in Ireland in 1846 and 1847, Dublin 1852, p.88.
[87] Cited by Helen E. Hatton in The Largest Amount of Good: Quaker Relief in Ireland, 1654-1921, Kingston & Montreal, 1993, p.194.
[88] Friends Relief of Distress Papers, 2/507/3.
[89] Papers Relating to Proceedings for the Relief of Distress, and the State of Union Workhouses in Ireland, Seventh Series 1848, British Parliamentary Papers, 1847-48, vol.liv, pp.35-36. Skilling’s method was to plant the potatoes in late autumn rather than in spring. According to a report in the Times, (31 May 1849), he planted them again for the following season: ‘Mr Skilling, the agriculturalist on the Galway estates of Lord Wallscourt promises to supply the market in the course of another week with an abundant stock [of potatoes] at the rate of 1s a stone’.
[90] Galway Mercury, 18 December 1847.
[91] Transactions of the Central Relief Committee, pp.426-27.
[92] The Times, 30 September 1848.
[93] ‘Harriet Martineau, Letters from Ireland, 2001 edn, Glenn Hooper, ed., Dublin, p.77.
[94] James Caird, The Plantation Scheme, or the West of Ireland as a Field for Investment, Edinburgh and London, 1850, pp.56-57
[95] ibid., p.57.
[96] Martineau, op.cit, p.77.
[97] Locks of Norbury.
[98] Eamon Finn, personal communication; Noel P. Wilkins, Ponds, Passes and Parcs: Aqualculture in Victorian Ireland, Dublin 1989, pp.191-93. The journalist and nationalist politician, T.P. O’Connor, who had often admired Ardfry was disappointed to find that the owner of this romantic great house was ‘a tiny little man, sad, deprecatory, almost timid in manner’ (cited in Bence-Jones, Country House, p.30). Charles William Joseph Henry Blake (1875-1920), the fifth lord, did not long survive his father, and there were no further claimants to the Wallscourt title.
[99] Timothy Collins, ‘Melville, Hart and Anderson: Early Teachers of Natural History, 1849-1914’, in Tadhg Foley, ed., From Queen’s College to National University: Essays on the Academic History of QCG/UCG/NUI, Galway, Dublin 1999pp.266-302; Thomas Skilling, The Turnip and its Culture, Dublin 1857.