IT WAS 1813 – 15 years after the the sectarian slaughter that followed the 1798 Rising, and 30 years before the Great Famine – when a postmistress in Carlow decided something had to be done about Irish landlords.
Mary Leadbeater was part of the Quaker settlement in Ballitore, near the border with Kildare. Her grandfather, Abraham Shackleton, had been the master of the famous school there, which educated both Edmund Burke and Napper Tandy, as well as children from as far away as France, Norway and the Caribbean.
The Quakers had the unfortunate custom of being fond of their neighbours without regard to religion, with the result that when the United revolution broke out in 1798, both sides regarded them as enemies – the rebels because they were Protestant; the Orangemen because they were too pally with their Catholic neighbours.
Mary Leadbeater documented the action in her journal. Her two little girls were terrified by starving United Irishmen with blunderbusses and muskets. (“Where does your father keep his money?” the men asked, and the older child shook her head. The toddler said: “I know where my father keeps his money”, and they said: “Where, honey?” and she told them: “In his breeches pocket.”) The local smith, a good friend, was dragged out and lynched by the Orangemen, as was Leadbeater’s dear friend, the local doctor.
She wrote then of one incident: “A fat tobacconist from Carlow lolled upon one of our chairs, and talked boastingly of the exploits performed by the military whom he had accompanied; how they had shot several, adding, ‘We burned one fellow in a barrel’. “I never in my life felt disgust so strongly; it even overpowered the horror due to the deed which had been actually committed. The stupid cruelty of a man in civil life, which urged him voluntarily and without necessity to leave his home and bear a part in such scenes, was far more revolting than the fiery wrath of a soldier.”
After the rebellion was suppressed things slowly returned to a sort of normal. A few years later Leadbeater wrote that people were relieved to see drunkenness returning. Before the Rising, the United men dared not drink for fear they’d talk, and others feared
to go to the pub for fear they’d be seen with the wrong
people.
Now, Mary Leadbeater wrote a few pamphlets to help peasants out of their dire situation. She used her grandfather’s example – he was a poor boy who made good by honest hard work and modest commerce – and told her readers to steer clear of alcohol, tobacco and tea, and to make pennies by growing vegetables and sallies and keeping bees and hens and spinning and saving.
All standard advice at the time. But no one had thought to educate the landlords. And Irish landlords were famous for grinding down their tenants.
Mary's booklet The Landlord's Friendgives a devastating vision of the world of our great-grandparents. Probably the last copy in the world is kept in the Quaker historical library in Stocking Lane, Dublin. The pamphlet's dialogues of landlords and ladies explore the situation of their tenants.
In one of the first, Squire Hartley – a firm but kindly Quaker landlord, from the sound of him – tells Squire Wilfort that he has set up a penny insurance fund – insuring the poor against illness.
Landlord Wilfort harrumphs “I fear they will rather spend this penny on tobacco and whiskey.” He has observed the lodging-places of the poor, “with disgust”, he says. “I would scarcely lodge my hogs in such a manner, but I suppose they imagine that dirt keeps them warm.
“Providence seems to have ordered it that both their minds and their bodies are fitted to their condition,” he explains.
Hartley disagrees. Ireland is full of orphans, he says, partly because of the late rebellion, but “often occasioned by fevers, a disorder comparatively unknown in an English village”. “Who can wonder at this who sees the poor heap of rubbish called a bed, on the damp ground, from whence the heat of the body exhales that unwholesome humidity which tortures the frame with rheumatism, and, united with the effects of poor living and whiskey, so often excites that dreadful disorder, a putrid fever.” The thrifty Wilfort says: “If you mean to provide bedsteads and bedding for the poor, even in our neighbourhood, the expense will be incalculable.”
“I propose to do this at their own expense,” says Hartley. At this, Wilfort protests: “You cannot! These poor creatures must, in that case, fast to better their lodging.” But Hartley says he has worked out how to do it without causing hardship: he has already run a scheme where he got his tenants to buy spinning wheels on the never-never, and set up a little industry, eventually supplying 48 wheels for the price of 12.
Now two ladies appear in the text, the frivolous Lady Charlotte scolding quakerly Lady Seraphina for “spoiling” her tenants.
Seraphina, a widow who has dismissed the land agent and split his wages between herself and her tenants, brings Charlotte out on the day she’s awarding tenant prizes.
“What neat, white houses and pretty gardens are here!” says Charlotte. “Is it possible that these are the dwellings of the idle, savage race which I have heard your tenants represented!” They admire the good and scold the bad.
At last, the ladies come to the lovely garden of Thomas and Phebe Lennon. “Ah, my Lady, it is but little heart I have to do any thing since we lost our good gardiner, our dear child, that never spared himself to keep us comfortable,” says old Thomas.
What age was their late son, asks Lady Charlotte, and she’s told that he was 23, the same age as their daughter Kitty. “Twins!” she exclaims.
“Please, your Ladyship, our dear Henry was a nurse child from Dublin,” says Thomas. “We were paid very well for him the two first years, but after that we never heard of his father or mother, and we were often in dread that they would come and take him from us, and my poor woman often said she would beg the world with him, sooner than part with him. But now we are obliged to part with him.” “What uncommon affection!” says Charlotte. But Seraphina says no, this is one of many proofs of “the strong attachment of the Irish to the children committed to their care, and of the humanity and generosity of the Irish character”.
How many of the landlords who bought the pamphlet showed such humanity and generosity when famine struck? Perhaps more than
we know.