Most of us were taught at school that 19th century landlords were a bad lot, a view which many people have probably never questioned, notwithstanding that a minority of landlords were, in fact, benevolent. Given the sheer awfulness of the Famine experience, dare one ask if the good landlords were no more than a very tiny minority or is it possible that their numbers might have been relatively substantial?
When the County Donegal Historical Society - thought to be the largest in the country - held its annual seminar recently in Stranorlar, all seven speakers contributed to the conference theme, "Landlordism in Donegal". Perhaps it was just a coincidence that six of the seven spoke about benevolent landlords, and the seventh spoke about Lord George Hill who seems to have been something of a marginal case.
Donegal had its share of bad proprietors, including the notorious third Earl of Leitrim and George Adair, but if the members of the Donegal Historical Society spent most of the daylong seminar listening to how six or seven local landlords tried to be kindly to their tenants, does this not beg the question how many others whose names and deeds have long since been forgotten strove to do likewise?
Forgotten landlords
Among the many almost forgotten landlord families were the Smiths of Baltiboys in West Wicklow and, while researching details locally for the book The Wicklow World of Elizabeth Smith, I discovered that almost nobody in the area recollected the name. Fortunately, Colonel Henry Smith's Scottish born wife, Elizabeth, kept a journal which subsequently formed the core of that book, with all the remarkable detail of how these two caring landowners came to know each of their tenants intimately, and fed and clothed them through the Famine years. As a result of its publication, a great-great granddaughter of Elizabeth Smith who lives in England presented the original journals to the National Library of Ireland two months ago.
A further consequence of that volume was the recent publication of a book about yet another benevolent landlord, John Hamilton of Donegal - arguably the most generous landlord of all, prompting the sub-title "This Recklessly Generous Landlord". He claimed that during the Famine only one of his 2,000 tenants died of starvation and very few resorted to relief works or to the poor house, but his benevolence cost him dearly. Though he inherited almost £1 million in today's money on his coming of age, after his death his son discovered that there was less than £50 in his father's bank account and a large part of the estate was mortgaged. This was to be the fate of other landlords too, but little is known about them or about their sacrifices.
Even in these more enlightened times, it may not be generally appreciated that some of the harshest criticisms of the bad landlords were expressed by some of the benevolent ones. The reason is obvious when it is remembered that one of the many ill-advised decisions made by the government during the Famine was the move to shift the responsibility for the care of the tenants from itself onto the landlords.
When many of them shirked this responsibility, the burden of feeding their neighbouring paupers then fell on those who were already looking after their own tenants. As both Elizabeth Smith and John Hamilton pointed out, government policy simultaneously penalised the good proprietors and encouraged the bad ones to continue doing nothing.
The evil that men do
While there can be no room for doubt that the good landlords were in a minority, there is some evidence that there may well have been more benevolent proprietors than has so far been generally surmised. One of the few historians to remark upon this was the late Professor J. C. Beckett who, in his Anglo-Irish Tradition, wrote that: "A good many landlords - more than is commonly recognised - did, in fact, try to improve the lot of their tenants and promote the general welfare of their neighbourhood".
It is unfortunate, to say the least, that while almost anybody who knows anything about the Famine or the Land Wars can readily name several of the bad ones, few could name a single good one. Shakespeare's well-known lines are, in this respect, remarkably apt: The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.
The experiences of Elizabeth Smith and John Hamilton are especially interesting because each of them kept journals - which have survived intact - providing today's reader with fascinating insights into life in rural Ireland during the last century as seen from the local neighbour, he will extort a far higher rent than any proprietor of an estate would think of asking".
By a curious coincidence, both Smith and Hamilton noted that there were five other caring landlords in their respective - and very different - areas, which begs the question that if there were six kindly proprietors in both West Wicklow and South Donegal, and if every whole county also had not less than this number, would it be preposterous to suggest that the total number of good landlords might have been as high as, say, two hundred? But whatever their actual number, it is surely unfair that their sacrifices should be forgotten and their names completely written out of our history books.