Remembering the legacy of Mayo's Michael Davitt
PART ONE
By Tom Gillespie
THURSDAY, March 25, marked the 175th anniversary of the birth of Land League founder Michael Davitt.
Born in Straide, at the height of the Famine, he was the third of five children born to Martin and Catherine Davitt. They were of poor farming origin, but Davitt's father had a good education and could speak English and Irish, which was the household language, and Davitt used it much later in life on a short visit to Australia.
In 1850, when Michael was four-and-a-half years old, his family was evicted from their home in Straide due to arrears in rent. They entered a local workhouse, but when Catherine discovered that male children over three years of age had to be separated from their mothers, she promptly decided her family should travel to England to find a better life, like many Irish people at this time.
They travelled to Dublin with another local family and in November reached Liverpool, walking the 48 miles to Haslingden in East Lancashire. There they settled.
Davitt, according to Wikipedia, was brought up in the closed world of a poor Irish immigrant community, with strong nationalist feelings and a deep hatred of landlordism.
After attending infant school, he began working at the age of nine as a labourer in a cotton mill but a month later he left and spent a short period working for Lawrence Whitaker, one of the leading cotton manufacturers in the district, before taking a job in Stellfoxe's Victoria Mill in Baxenden.
Here he was put operating a spinning machine. On May 8, 1857, his right arm was entangled in a cogwheel and was mangled so badly it had to be amputated. He did not receive any compensation.
When he recovered from his operation, a local benefactor, John Dean, helped to send him to a Wesleyan school, which was connected to the Methodist Church, and here he received a good education.
In 1861, at the age of 15, he went to work in a local post office, owned by Henry Cockcroft, who also ran a printing business. Despite his injury, he learned to be a typesetter. He was later promoted to letter carrier and bookkeeper and worked in the printing office for five years.
Davitt took night classes at the local Mechanics’ Institute and used its library. He became interested in Irish history and the contemporary Irish social situation under the influence of Ernest Charles Jones, the veteran Chartist leader, learning his radical views on land nationalisation and Irish independence.
In 1865, this interest led Davitt to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), which had strong support among working-class Irish emigrants. He soon became part of the inner circle of the local group.
Two years later he left the printing firm to devote himself full-time to the IRB, as organising secretary for Northern England and Scotland, arranging arms smuggling to Ireland using his new job as ‘hawker’ (travelling salesman) as cover.
Davitt was involved in a failed raid on Chester Castle to obtain arms on February 11, 1867, in advance of the Fenian Rising in Ireland, but evaded the law.
In the Haslingden area he helped to organise the defence of Catholic churches against Protestant attack in 1868. He was arrested in Paddington Station, London, on May 14, 1870, while awaiting a delivery of arms. He was convicted of treason felony and sentenced to 15 years' penal servitude in Dartmoor Prison.
He was kept in solitary confinement and received harsh treatment. In prison he concluded that ownership of the land by the people was the only solution to Ireland's problems.
Davitt managed to get a covert contact to Irish Parliamentary Party MP John O’Connor Power, who campaigned against cruelty inflicted on political prisoners.
He often read Davitt's letters into the records of the House of Commons, with his party pressing for an amnesty for Irish nationalist prisoners.
Due to public furore over his treatment, Davitt was released, along with other political prisoners, on December 19, 1877, when he had served seven-and-a-half years, on a ‘ticket of leave’.
He and the other prisoners were given a heroes' welcome on landing in Ireland.
In 1873, while Davitt was imprisoned, his mother and three sisters had settled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1878 Davitt travelled to the United States on a lecture tour organised by John Devoy and the Fenians (IRB), hoping to gain the support of Irish-American communities for his new policy of ‘The Land for the People’. He returned in 1879 to his native Mayo where he at once involved himself in land agitation.
In the 1880s, many people in the west of Ireland were suffering from the effects of the Famine; 1879 was one of the wettest years on record and the potato crop failed for a third successive year.
Davitt organised a large meeting that attracted (by varying accounts) 4,000 to 13,000 people in Irishtown on April 20. Davitt himself did not attend the meeting, presumably because he was on ticket-of-leave and could not risk being sent back to prison in England.
He made plans for a huge campaign of agitation to reduce rents. The local target was a Catholic priest, Canon Ulick Burke, who had threatened to evict his tenants.
A campaign of non-payment pressured him to cancel the evictions and reduce his rents by 25 per cent.
On August 16, 1879, the Land League of Mayo was formally founded in the Imperial Hotel in Castlebar, with the active support of Charles Stewart Parnell. On October 21 it was superseded by the Irish National Land League. Parnell was made its president and Davitt was one of its secretaries.
This group united practically all the different strands of land agitation and land movements since the Tenant Right League of the 1850s under a single organisation, and from then until 1882, the 'Land War' in pursuance of the ‘Three Fs’ - Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure and Free Sale - was fought in earnest.