‘Vegetable Haughton’ – Brian Maye on social reformer and philanthropist James Haughton

It’s difficult to understand why some people, important in our history, become forgotten. One such would be the social reformer and philanthropist, James Haughton, who died 150 years ago on February 20th. As well as opposing slavery, he advocated temperance, electoral, sanitary and land reform, the extension of educational opportunity, pacifism and animal rights.

He was born on May 5th, 1795, in Carlow town, the eldest son of Samuel Pearson Haughton, a corn merchant, and Mary Ruskin, and attended the Quaker school at Ballitore, Co Kildare, remaining a Quaker until joining the Unitarians in 1834. Following two years in the family business in Carlow, he moved to Cork for five years, working in his uncle’s firm, before settling in Dublin 1819. There he formed a long, successful flour-and-corn merchant business partnership with his brother William, which endured until his retirement.

He married Mary Anne Bancroft of Cork in 1822 and they had a son and four daughters. After the premature death of his beloved wife in 1829, he devoted his attention to questions of reform. “An archetypal nonconformist social reformer, Haughton strongly believed that the welfare of humanity could be progressively improved by the application of enlightened policies,” according to Frances Clarke and James Quinn, who wrote the entry on him in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.

A social problem to which he devoted much of his life to tackling was alcohol abuse which he was convinced was the main cause of Dublin’s poverty and crime. He joined the Dublin Temperance Society soon after its foundation in 1829 and was elected president of the Irish Temperance Union. Becoming a teetotaller himself in 1838, he had many letters advocating temperance published in the press, signed “Son of a Water Drinker”. During the Great Famine, he called for the shutting down of breweries and distilleries to save grain and he himself stopped trading in malt and barley. He twice represented Ireland at International Temperance Conventions in London and worked with Fr Theobald Mathew, the well-known temperance priest, and the Carmelite Fr John Spratt, with whom he held weekly public temperance meetings during the 1850s and 1860s in Dublin.

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With others, in 1855 he raised the money needed to buy out the rights of the family that owned the notorious Donnybrook Fair, thus putting an end to that annual occasion for a fortnightly debauchery that had lasted since 1204. Knowing that working-class people needed social outlets other than pubs, he campaigned for the People’s Gardens in the Phoenix Park, Sunday openings of the Zoological Gardens at a penny admission and free admission to the Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin.

He was also prominent in the Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society, representing Ireland at the “World’s Anti-Slavery Convention” in London in 1838 and 1840. His Four Letters to the Irish People on the Use of Articles Produced by Slaves (1841) was a ringing denunciation of slavery. Admiring Daniel O’Connell, especially for his opposition to slavery and his pacifism, he joined the Repeal Association in 1840 and tried to mediate between the Young Irelanders and O’Connell in 1846 when the latter tried to expel the former from the association. Following failure of negotiations, he joined Young Ireland for a time but left over its failure to condemn slavery in an address to the US vice-president. After the failure of the Young Ireland insurrection in 1848, he raised funds for the defence of its arrested members and he also supported amnesty for Fenian prisoners after the 1867 rebellion.

Haughton performed many philanthropic services during the Great Famine and strongly advocated land reform and tenant rights. He was a founder and officer of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland and active in the Hibernian Peace Society and the British India Society. Among his other causes were the extension of voting rights, sanitary reform, expansion of educational opportunities, opposition to capital punishment and advocacy of animal rights.

He’d become a vegetarian in 1846 on moral and sanitary grounds and was president of the Vegetarian Society of the United Kingdom for two to three years. As Juliana Adelman wrote in this paper (November 12th, 2020), he proposed a vegetarian diet as a solution to some Irish problems. He believed reducing dependency on cattle grazing would create more employment in a diversified agriculture and produce healthier human beings. “His reasoning might impress conservationists today,” she contended, but opponents at the time dubbed him “Vegetable Haughton”.

He and his like-minded contemporary advocates were collectively labelled “The Anti-Everythingarians” but he persisted in his beliefs. “Although some contemporaries considered him overly zealous and naïve in his beliefs, he was widely respected for his humanity and sincerity,” according to Clarke and Quinn. Testament to this was the huge crowd that attended his funeral to Mount Jerome Cemetery 150 years ago on February 24th.