Edward and George Benn were brothers from whose philanthropy the city of Belfast greatly benefitted, although it has been said that they weren’t so generous to their tenants. They were also antiquarians who left behind a significant body of work. Edward died 150 years ago on August 3rd.
He was born in Tandragee, Co Armagh, in 1798 (date and month unknown), the third of four sons and five daughters of John Benn, a Belfast brewer, and his wife Elizabeth Craig. The family’s Benn ancestors came from Cumberland in the 18th century. He attended school in the Belfast Academy on Cliftonville Road. Having moved to Downpatrick, Co Down, he and his younger brother George (later a historian of Belfast), to whom he was very close for his entire lifetime, ran a distillery.
They later moved to Glenravel estate, near Ballymena, Co Antrim, which had been apparently bought by their father, where they undertook extensive development during the 1830s, building houses and roads and reclaiming and cultivating land. There Edward built Glenravel House, which he moved into in 1842. “Although innovative and ambitious in their enterprises, the brothers did not always prosper, and a potentially significant attempt to distil spirits from potatoes was frustrated by excise regulations,” according to Helen Andrews and Ruan O’Donnell, who wrote the entry on Edward Benn in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.
This provoked a sarcastic letter of complaint from him to the British prime minister, Lord John Russell, where he referred to the “mystery of the British excise” and this “new way of increasing the revenue of the county by destroying and wasting the property of the country”. The brothers lost a lot of money in the enterprise and this loss and the terrible potato blight that followed in the mid-1840s caused them to move to Liverpool in pursuit of other business opportunities.
Big Benn – Brian Maye on Belfast philanthropist and antiquarian Edward Benn
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When iron-ore deposits were discovered in the hills around Glenravel, they returned to Antrim, where they conducted smelting and took commercial advantage of the iron ore. This led to the development of a significant local industry, which greatly enriched the Benns.
To their credit, they shared their wealth generously through various philanthropic undertakings in the region, especially as a result of being members of the Belfast Charitable Society.
Edward Benn had a particular understanding of the importance of specialist hospitals and contributed to the development of three of Belfast’s six. Inspired by the work of the eye specialist Dr William McKeown, he provided the funds to rebuild, in 1874, the Ulster Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital (founded in 1871); it was given his surname in its title. “The hospital served the local community faithfully, including continuing to provide care as German bombs fell around it during the Belfast Blitz” (see www.greatplacenorthbelfast.com). The Belfast Hospital for Diseases of the Skin, established in 1865, moved to a new building on Glenravel Street, which he paid for (Glenravel Street was named after his family estate). It provided experimental skin treatments and attracted patients from all over the world, until its destruction by German bombs in 1941. Glenravel Street is also no more, having been incorporated into the Westlink Motorway.
He also founded the Samaritan Hospital for Women and Children, the foundation stone for which was laid shortly after his death in August 1874. “Benn was a man of advanced ideas: his hospitals were non-sectarian and open to all, and were financed by subscriptions for the poor and by fees for the more affluent,” according to Helen Andrews and Ruan O’Donnell. He further anonymously funded two additional wings to the Belfast Charitable Hospital (the city’s old Poor House), which was later named after him.
His membership of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society (BNHPS) reflected his deep interest in antiquarianism. He wrote articles for various journals, such as the Irish Penny Journal and the Journal of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society, and Objects in Glass was a pamphlet published by him in 1855. To the BNHPS he bequeathed his extensive antiquarian library and valuable collection of antiquities, the latter featuring more than 1,500 objects, which were kept in the Benn Room and then transferred to the Ulster Museum. A generous donation from him to Belfast Academical Institution enabled it to build a new maths department.
A non-subscribing Presbyterian, he remained unmarried and was “peculiarly retiring”, according to his brother. Following a period of ill health, he died at Glenravel House and was buried in Clifton Street cemetery, Belfast. His estate was left to his brother George, who gave portraits of him to the Samaritan Hospital and to Belfast Charitable Society, and the Benn papers are in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.
“The projects he funded . . . proved an invaluable source of medical care for decades and shaped the subsequent development of Clifton Street as an area of medical excellence” (www.greatplacenorthbelfast.com).