Ireland Under Coercion Volume I Part 6

It stands on the long main street which is really the town. At one end of this street is a very pretty row of picturesque ivy-clad brick cottages, built by a landlord whose property and handsome park bound the town on the west; and the street winds alongside the slope of a hill rising from the bank of the Sw.i.l.l.y river. A fair was going on. The little market-place was alive with bustling, chattering, and chaffering country-folk. Smartly-dressed young damsels tripped in and out of the neat well-filled shops, and in front of a row of semidetached villas, like a suburban London terrace, on the hill opposite "Hegarty's," a German band smote the air with discordant fury. Decidedly a lively, prosperous little town is Letterkenny, nor was I surprised to learn from a communicative gentleman, nursing his cane near the inn-door, that advantage would be taken of the presence of the Hussars sent to keep order at Dunfanaghy, to "give a ball."

"But I thought all the country was in arms about the trials at Dunfanaghy," I said.

"In arms about the trials at Dunfanaghy? Oh no; they'll never be locked up, Father M'Fadden and Mr. Blane. And the people here at Letterkenny, they've more sinse than at Dunfanaghy. Have you heard of the champagne?"

Upon this he proceeded to tell me, as a grand joke, that Father M'Fadden and Mr. Blane, M.P., having declined to accept the tea offered them by the authorities during their detention, they had been permitted to order what they liked from the local hotel-keeper. After the trial was over, and they were released on bail to prosecute their appeal, the hotel-keeper demanded of the authorities payment of his bill, including two bottles of champagne ordered to refresh the member for Armagh!

A conspicuous, smart, spick-and-span house on the main street, built of brick and wood, with a verandah, and picked out in bright colours, was pointed out to me by this amiable citizen as the residence of a "returned American." This was a man, he said, who had made some money in America, but got tired of living there, and had come back to end his days in his native place He was a good man, my informant added, "only he puts on too many airs."

A remarkably handsome, rosy-faced young groom, a model of manhood in vigour and grace, presently brought us up a wagonette with a pair of stout nags, and a driver in a suit of dark-brown frieze, whose head seemed to have been driven down between his shoulders. He never lifted it up all the way to Gweedore, but he proved to be a capital jarvey notwithstanding, and knew the country as well as his horses.

Not long after leaving the town by a road which pa.s.ses the huge County Asylum (now literally crammed, I am told, with lunatics), we pa.s.sed a ruined church on the banks of a stream. Here the country people, it seems, halt and wash their feet before entering Letterkenny, failing which ceremony they may expect a quarrel with somebody before they get back to their homes. This wholesome superst.i.tion doubtless was established ages ago by some good priest, when priests thought it their duty to be the preachers and makers of peace.

We soon left the wooded country of the Sw.i.l.l.y and began to climb into the grand and melancholy Highlands of Donegal. The road was as fine as any in the Scottish Highlands, and despite the keen chill wind, the glorious and ever-changing panoramas of mountain and strath through which we drove were a constant delight, until, just as we came within full range of Muckish, the giant of Donegal, the weather finally broke down into driving mists and blinding rain.

We pulled up near a picturesque little shebeen, to water the horses and get our Highland wraps well about us. Out came a hardy, cheery old farmer. He swept the heavens with the eye of a mountaineer, and exclaimed:--"Ah! it's a coorse day intirely, it is." "A coorse day intirely" from that moment it continued to be.

Happily the curtain had not fallen before we caught a grand pa.s.sing glimpse of the romantic gorge of Glen Veagh, closed and commanded in the shadowy distance by the modern castle of Glenveagh, the mountain home of my charming country-woman, Mrs. Adair.

Thanks to its irregular serpentine outline, and to the desolate majesty of the hills which environ it, Lough Veagh, though not a large sheet of water, may well be what it is reputed to be, a rival of the finest lochs in Scotland. No traces are now discernible on its sh.o.r.es of the too celebrated evictions of Glen Veagh. But from the wild and rugged aspect of the surrounding country it is probable enough that these evictions were to the evicted a blessing in disguise, and that their descendants are now enjoying, beyond the Atlantic, a measure of prosperity and of happiness which neither their own labour nor the most liberal legislation could ever have won for them here. We caught sight, as we drove through Mrs. Adair's wide and rocky domain, of wire fences, and I believe it is her intention to create here a small deer forest. This ought to be as good a stalking country as the Scottish Highlands, provided the people can be got to like "stalking" stags better than landlords and agents.

Long before we reached Glen Veagh we had bidden farewell, not only to the hedges and walls of Tyrone and Eastern Donegal, but to the "ditches," which anywhere but in Ireland would be called "embankments,"

and entered upon great stone-strewn wastes of land seemingly unreclaimed and irreclaimable. Huge boulders lay tossed and tumbled about as if they had been whirled through the air by the cyclones of some prehistoric age, and dropped at random when the wild winds wearied of the fun. The last landmark we made out through the gathering storm was the pinnacled crest of Errigal. Of Dunlewy, esteemed the loveliest of the Donegal lakes, we could see little or nothing as we hurried along the highway, which follows its course down to the Clady, the river of Gweedore; and we blessed the memory of Lord George Hill when suddenly turning from the wind and the rain into what seemed to be a mediaeval courtyard flanked by trees, we pulled up in the bright warm light of an open doorway, shook ourselves like Newfoundland dogs, and were welcomed by a frank, good-looking Scottish host to a glowing peat fire in this really comfortable little hotel, the central pivot of a most interesting experiment in civilisation.

GWEEDORE, _Sunday, Feb. 5th._--A morning as soft and bright almost as April succeeded the stormy night. Errigal lifted his bold irregular outlines royally against an azure sky. The sunshine glinted merrily on the swift waters of the Clady, which flows almost beneath our windows from Dunlewy Lough to the sea. The birds were singing in the trees, which all about our hotel make what in the West would be called an "opening" in the wide and woodless expanse of hill and bog.

This hotel was for many years the home of Lord George Hill, who built it in the hope of making Gweedore, what in England or Scotland it would long ago have become, a prosperous watering-place. Now that a battle-royal is going on between Lord George's son and heir and the tenants on the estate, organised by Father M'Fadden under the "Plan of Campaign," it is important to know something of the history of the place.

Is this a case of the sons of the soil expropriated by an alien and confiscating Government to enrich a ruthless invader? I was told by a Nationalist acquaintance in Dublin that the owner of Gweedore is a near kinsman of the Marquis of Londonderry, and that the property came to him by inheritance under an ancient confiscation of the estates of the O'Dounels of Tyrconnel. All of this I find is embroidery.

The "Carlisle" room, which our landlord has a.s.signed to us, contains a number of books, the property of the late Lord George, and ample materials are here for making out the annals of Gweedore. Lord George, it seems, was a posthumous son of the fourth Marquis of Downshire, and a nephew of that Marchioness of Salisbury who was burned to death with the west wing of Hatfield House half a century ago. He inherited nothing in Donegal, nor was any provision made for him under his father's will. His elder brothers made up and settled upon him a sum of twenty thousand pounds. He entered the Army, and being quartered for a time at Letterkenny, shot and fished all about Donegal. He found the people here kindly and friendly, but in a deplorable state of ignorance and of dest.i.tution. Their holdings under sundry small proprietors were entirely unimproved, and as their families increased, these holdings were cut up by themselves into even smaller strips under the system known as "rundale,"--each son as he grew up taking off a slice of the paternal holding, putting up a hut with mud, and scratching the soil after his own rude fashion. This custom, necessarily fatal to civilisation, doubtless came down from the traditional times when the lands of a sept were held in common by the sept, before the native chieftains had converted themselves into landlords, and defeated Sir John Davies's attempt to convert their tribal kinsmen into peasant proprietors.

Whatever its origin, it had reduced Gweedore, or "Tullaghobegly," fifty years ago to barbarism. Nearly nine thousand people then dwelt here with never a landlord among them. There was no "Coercion" in Gweedore, neither was there a coach nor a car to be found in the whole district.

The nominal owners of the small properties into which the district was divided knew little and cared less about them. The rents were usually "made by the tenants,"--a step in advance, it will be seen, of the system which the collective wisdom of Great Britain has for the last twenty years been trying to establish in Ireland. But they were only paid when it was convenient. An agent of one of these properties who travelled fourteen miles one day to collect some rents gave it up and drove back again, because the "day was too bad" for him to wander about in the mountains on the chance of finding the tenants at home and disposed to give him a trifle on account. On most of the properties there were arrears of eight, ten, and twenty years' standing.

There was one priest in the district, and one National School, the schoolmaster, with a family of nine persons, receiving the munificent stipend of eight pounds a year. These nine thousand people, depending absolutely upon tillage and pasture, owned among them all one cart and one plough, eight saddles, two pillions, eleven bridles, and thirty-two rakes! They had no means of harrowing their lands but with meadow rakes, and the farms were so small that from four to ten farms could be harrowed in a day with one rake.

Their beds were of straw, mountain gra.s.s, or green and dried rushes.

Among the nine thousand people there were but two feather-beds, and but eight beds stuffed with chaff. There were but two stables and six cow-houses in the whole district. None of the women owned more than one shift, nor was there a single bonnet among them all, nor a looking-gla.s.s costing more than threepence.

The climate and the scenery took the fancy of Lord George. He made up his mind to see what could be done with this forgotten corner of the world, and to that end bought up as he could the small and scattered properties, till he had invested the greater part of his small fortune, and acquired about twenty thousand acres of land. Of this, little was fit for cultivation, even with the help of capital and civilised management. There was not a road in the district, nor a drain.

Lord George came and established himself here. He went to work systematically to improve the country, reclaiming bog-lands, building roads, and laying out the property into regular farms. He went about among the people himself, trying to get their confidence, and to let them know what he wanted to do for them, and with their help.

For a long time they wouldn't believe him to be a lord at all, "because he spoke Irish"; and the breaking up of the rundale system, under which they had lived in higgledy-piggledy laziness, exasperated them greatly.

Of the first man who took a fenced and well-defined farm from Lord George, and went to work on it, the others observed that he would come to no good by it, because he would "have to keep a maid just to talk to his wife." Men could not be got for any wages to work at draining, or at making the "ditches" or embankments to delineate the new holdings; and when Lord George found adventurous "tramps" willing to earn a few shillings by honest work of the kind, conspiracies were formed to undo by night what was done by day. However, Lord George persevered.

There was not a shop, nor a dispensary, nor a doctor, nor a warehouse, nor a quay for landing goods in this whole populous and sea-washed region. He put up storehouses, built a little harbour at Bunbeg, established a dispensary, got a doctor to settle in the district, and finally put up the hotel in which we are. He advanced money to tenants disposed to improve their holdings. Finding the women, as usual, more thrifty and industrious than the men, and gifted with a natural apt.i.tude for the loom and the spindle, he introduced the weaving of woollen yarn into stout frieze stuffs and foot-gear for both s.e.xes. This was in 1840, and in 1854 Gweedore hand-knit socks and stockings were sold to the amount of 500, being just about the annual estimated rents of all the properties bought by Lord George at the time when he bought them in 1838! But with this difference: The owners from whom Lord George bought the properties got their 500 very irregularly, when they got it at all; whereas the wives and daughters of the tenants, who made the socks and stockings, were paid their 500 in cash.

Clearly in Gweedore I have a case not of the children of the soil despoiled and trampled upon by the stranger, but of the honest investment of alien capital in Irish land, and of the administration by the proprietor himself of the Irish property so acquired for the benefit alike of the owner and of the occupiers of the land.

That the deplorable state in which he found the people was mainly due to their own improvidence and gregarious incapacity is also tolerably clear. On the west coast of Norway, dear to the heart of the salmon-fisher, you find people living under conditions certainly no more favourable than here exist. North of the Hardanger Fjord, the spring opens only in June. The farmers grow only oats and barley; but they have no market except for the barley, and live chiefly by the pasturage. It is as rocky a region as Donegal. But the Nors.e.m.e.n never try to make the land do more than it is capable of doing. With them the oldest son takes the farm and works it. The juniors are welcome to work on the farm if they like for their brother, but they are not allowed to cut it up.

There is no rundale in Norway; and when the cadets see that there is no room for them they quietly "pull up stakes," and go forth to seek a new home, no matter where.

For fourteen years Lord George Hill spent on Gweedore all the rents he received from it, and a great deal more. During that time the relations between the people and their new landlord seem to have been, in the main, most friendly, notwithstanding his constant efforts to break up their old habits, or, to use their own language, to "bother them." But there were no "evictions"; rents were not raised even where the tenants were visibly able to pay better rents; prizes were given annually for the best and neatest cottages, for the best crops of turnips (neither turnips, parsnips, nor carrots were there at Gweedore when Lord George bought the estate), for the best pigs (there was not a pig in Gweedore in 1838!), for calves and colts, for the best fences, the best ordered tillage farms, the best labourers' cottages, the best beds and bedding, the best b.u.t.ter, the best woollen goods made on the estate. The old rundale plan of dividing up the land among the children was put a stop to, and every tenant was encouraged not to make his holding smaller, but to add to and enlarge it. A corn-mill, saw-mill, and flax-mill were established. In 1838 there was not a baker within ten miles. In 1852 the local baker was driving a good business in good bread. The tenant's wife, for whom in 1838 a single shift was a social superiority, in 1852 went shopping at Bunbeg for the latest fashions from Derry or Dublin.

Whatever "landlordism" may mean elsewhere in Ireland, it is plain enough that in the history of Gweedore it has meant the difference between savage squalor and civilisation.

Lord George Hill died in 1879, the year in which the Land League began its operations. He bequeathed this property to his son, Captain Hill, by whom the management of it has been left to agents. After Lord George's death two tracts of mountain pasture, reserved by him to feed imported sheep, were let to the tenants, who by that time had come to own quite a considerable number, some thousands, of live stock, cattle, horses, and sheep.

Concurrently with this concession to the tenants the provisions made by Lord George against the subdivision of holdings began to give way.

Father M'Fadden, combining the position of President of the National League with that of parish priest, seems to have favoured this tendency, and to have encouraged the putting up of new houses on reduced holdings to accommodate an increasing population. A flood which in August 1880 damaged the chapel and caused the death of five persons gave him an opportunity of bringing before the British public the condition of the people in a letter to the London _Times_, which elicited a very generous response, several hundred pounds, it is said, having been sent to him from London alone. Large contributions of relief were also made to Gweedore from the d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough's Fund, and Gweedore became a standing b.u.t.t of British benevolence. Two results seem to have followed, naturally enough,--a growing indisposition on the part of the tenants to pay rent, and a rapid rise in the value of tenant rights. With the National League standing between them and the landlord, with the British Parliament legislating year after year in favour of the Irish tenant and against the Irish landlord, and with the philanthropic public ready to respond to any appeal for help made on their behalf, the tenants at Gweedore naturally became a privileged cla.s.s. In no other way at least can I explain the extraordinary fact that tenant rights at Gweedore have been sold, according to Lord Cowper's Blue-book of 1886, during the period of the greatest alleged distress and congestion in this district, at prices representing from forty to a hundred-and-thirty years'

purchase of the landlord's rent!

In this Blue-book the Rev. Father M'Fadden appears as receiving no less than 115 sterling for the tenant-right sold by him of ground, the head rent of which is 1, 2s. 6d. a year. The worst enemy of Father M'Fadden will hardly suspect him, I hope, of taking such a sum as this from a tenant farmer for the right to starve to death by inches.[13]

A shrewd Galway man, now here, who seems to know the region well, and likes both the scenery and the people, tells me that the troubles which have now culminated in the arrest of Father M'Fadden have been aggravated by the vacillation of Captain Hill, and by the foibles of his agent, Colonel Dopping, who not long ago brought down Mr. Gladstone with his unloaded rifle. That the tenants as a body have been, or now are, unable to pay their rent he does not believe. On the contrary, he thinks them, as a body, rather well off. Certainly I have seen and spoken with none of them about the roads to-day who were not hearty-looking men, and in very good case. Colonel Dopping, according to my Galwegian, is not an Englishman, but a Longford Irishman of good family, who got his training in India as an official of the Woods and Forests in Bengal. "He is not a bad-hearted man, nor unkind," said my Galwegian, "but he is too much of a Bengal tiger in his manner. He went into the cottages personally and lectured the people, and that they never will stand. They don't require or expect you to believe what they say--in fact they have little respect for you if you do--but they like to have the agent pretend that he believes them, and then go on and show that he don't.

But he must never lose his temper about it. Colonel Dopping, I have heard, argued with an old woman one day who was telling him more yarns than were ever spun into cloth in Gweedore, till she picked up her cup of tea and threw it in his face. He flounced out of the cottage, and ordered the police to arrest her. That did him more harm than if he had shot a dozen boys." "What with the temper of Colonel Dopping and the vacillation of Captain Hill, who is always of the mind of the last man that speaks to him, Father M'Fadden has had it all his own way. Captain Hill's claim was for 1800 of arrears, long arrears too, and 400 of costs. How much the people paid in under the Plan of Campaign n.o.body knows but Father M'Fadden. But he is a clever _padre_, and he played Captain Hill till he finally gave up the costs, and settled for 1450."

"And this sum represents what?"

"It represents in round numbers about two years' income from an estate in which Captain Hill's father must have invested, first and last, more nearly 40,000 than 20,000 of money that never came out of it."

"That doesn't sound like a very good operation. But isn't the question, Whether the tenants have earned this sum, such as it is, out of the land let to them by Captain Hill?"

"No, not exactly, I think. You must remember there are some twelve hundred families living here on land bought with Lord George's money, and enjoying all the advantages which the place owes to his investment and his management, much more than to any labour or skill of theirs. You must look at their rents as accommodation rents. Suppose they earn the rent in Scotland, or England, or Tyrone, or wherever you like, the question is, What do they get for it from Captain Hill? They get a holding with land enough to grow potatoes on, and with as much free fuel as ever they like, and with free pasture for their beasts, and all this they get on the average, mind you, for no more than ten shillings a year! Why, there was a time, I can a.s.sure you, when the women here earned the value of all the Hill rents by knitting stockings and making woollen stuffs. You see the stuffs lying here in this window that they make even now, and good stuffs too. But before the League boycotted the agency here, the agency ten years ago used to pay out 900 in a year, where it pays less than 100 to the women for their work."

"Why did the League do this?"

"Why? Why, because it wanted to control the work itself, and to know just what it brings into the place. You must remember Father M'Fadden is the President of the League, and the people will do anything for him. I have heard of one old woman who sat up of nights last year knitting socks to send up to London, to pay the Christmas dues to the Father,--six shillings' worth."

"And are these stuffs here in the hotel made for the agency you speak of?"

"Oh no; these are just made by women that know the hotel, and Mr.

Robinson here, he kindly takes in the stuffs. You see the name of every woman on every one of them that made it, and the price. If a stranger buys some, he pays the money to Mr. Robinson, and so it goes to the women, and no commission charged."

The "stuffs" are certainly excellent, very evenly woven; and the patterns, all devised, I am told, by the women themselves, very simple and tasteful. The only dyes used are got by the women also from the sea-weeds and the kelp, which must be counted among the resources of the place. The browns and ochres thus produced are both soft and vivid; while nothing can be better than a peculiar warm grey, produced by a skilful mingling of the undyed wools.

"What, then, causes the distress for which the name of Gweedore is a synonym?" I asked.

"It doesn't exist," responded my Galwegian; "that is, there is no such distress in Gweedore as you find in Connemara, for instance;[14] but what distress there is in Gweedore is due much more to the habits the people have been getting into of late years, and to the idleness of them, than to any pressure of the rents you hear about, or even to the poverty of the soil. Go down to the store at Bunbeg, and see what they buy and go in debt for! You won't find in any such place as Bunbeg in England such things. And even this don't measure it; for, you see, two-thirds of them are not free to deal at Bunbeg."

"Why not? Is Bunbeg 'boycotted'?"

"No, not at all. But they are on the books of the 'Gombeen man'--Sweeney of Dungloe and Burtonport. They're always in debt to him for the meal; and then he backs the travelling tea-pedlars, and the bakers that carry around cakes, and all these run up the accounts all the time. Tot up what these people lay out for tea at four shillings a pound--and they won't have cheap tea--and what they pay for meal, and what they pay for interest, and the 'testimonials,'--they paid for the monument here to O'Donnell, the Donegal man that murdered Carey,--and the dues to the priest, and you'll find the 700 or so they don't pay the landlord going in other directions three and four times over."

"Then they are falling back into all the old laziness, the men sauntering about, or sitting and smoking, while the women do all the work."