MICHAEL DAVITT 1846 – 1906 An exhibition to honour the centenary of his death MAYO COUNTY LIBRARY www.mayolibrary.ie MAYO COUNTY LIBRARY MICHAEL DAVITTwas born the www.mayolibrary.ie son of a small tenant farmer at Straide, Co. Mayo in 1846. He arrived in the world at a time when Ireland was undergoing the greatest social and humanitarian disaster in its modern history, the Great Famine of 1845-49. Over the five or so years it endured, about a million people died and another million emigrated. BIRTH OF A RADICAL IRISHMAN He was also born in a region where the Famine, caused by potato blight, took its greatest toll in human life and misery. Much of the land available for cultivation in Co. Mayo was poor and the average valuation of its agricultural holdings was the lowest in the country. At first the Davitts managed to survive the famine when Michael’s father, Martin, became an overseer of road construction on a famine relief scheme. However, in 1850, unable to pay the rent arrears for the small landholding of about seven acres, the family was evicted. left: The enormous upheaval of the The Famine in Ireland — Extreme pressure of population on Great Famine that Davitt Funeral at Skibbereen (Illustrated London News, natural resources and extreme experienced as an infant set the January 30, 1847) dependence on the potato for mould for his moral and political above: survival explain why Mayo suffered attitudes as an adult. Departure for the “Viceroy” a greater human loss (29%) during steamer from the docks at Galway. the famine decade (1841-51) than The Famine also had a drastic effect (K.Neill, An illustrated history any other county except on the patterns of agriculture and of the Irish people) Roscommon (32%). landholding that would shape the below: t.w. moody, davitt and irish An evicted family ( Land War thirty years later, when (John Haney, Charles Stewart revolution, 1981, p. 3) Davitt sprung to public prominence. Parnell) I was then but four and a half year’s old,yet I have a distinct remembrance of that morning’s scene: the remnant of our household furniture flung about the road;the roof of the house falling in and the thatch taking fire;my mother and father looking on with four young children… Michael Davitt (quoted in Moody, p.503) MAYO COUNTY THE DAVITT FAMILY was In 1855, at the age of nine, Michael LIBRARY among the comparatively lucky went to work in the local cotton- www.mayolibrary.ie half of the Famine’s victims who mill. His fate in being sent out to survived its worst effects through work so early was nothing unusual emigration, in their case to for the time; Charles Dickens Liverpool, where they arrived on 1 suffered the same fate and used his November 1850. They settled in experiences in his work. the small textile town of Haslingden, seventeen miles The following passage from Hard north of Manchester, following in Times (1854) could easily be the the footsteps of neighbours who environment in which the Davitt were already working in its textile family lived and worked: mills. SALVATION THROUGH EMIGRATION It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of buildings full of windows where there was a rattling and trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam- engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next. On 8 May 1857, in attempting to clear a blockage in a cotton-carding engine, Davitt’s shirt became Cover illustration showing entangled in its cogwheels, causing abuse of mill children from a his arm to become trapped and book, White slaves of England, 1853. mangled. The arm was amputated below the shoulder. This life-altering accident caused Davitt to spend his life championing the cause of the working-man, whether he toiled on the land or in the factory. above: The Davitt family home in Haslingden, now demolished (Courtesy of Mr John Dunleavy) below: Victoria Mill, Haslingden, where Davitt lost his right arm in 1857 (Courtesy of Mr John Dunleavy) MAYO COUNTY LIBRARY www.mayolibrary.ie Davitt, aged 17 (Trinity College Library, Dublin) SCHOOLING AND POLITICAL AWAKENING The post office in Hazlingden IF THERE WAS a blessing in where Davitt worked. (O'Hara, Bernard, Michael Davitt Davitt’s accident it was that it remembered) saved him from a life of drudgery inset: and opened up to him an Henry Cockroft, postmaster of opportunity for education and haslingden and Davitt’s employer 1861 –’68 intellectual development that (Trinity College Library, Dublin) might otherwise never have come below: his way. As soon as he had Ernest Jones recovered from the amputation, (Working Class Movement Library) he was sent to a local Methodist school, where he received a first- class schooling from his enlightened teacher, George Poskett. The disaster that cost him his arm…led to the blessings of an education that fostered his mental powers, and taught him to accept religious diversity as a social fact An interest in politics was first and not a source of estrangement kindled in Davitt in 1861 when he among men. went to listen to the radical Chartist (t.w. moody, p. 19) leader, Ernest Jones. Chartism was a movement established in 1836 to In 1861 Davitt took up a job as an campaign for universal voting rights assistant in the Haslingden post leading to social and economic office where a printing and reform. Jones was in favour of land stationery business was also run. nationalisation, which would soon Michael impressed his employer by become one of the key goals of showing a skill and dexterity in Davitt’s political philosophy. setting type with one hand as if he had two. Throughout his life Michael was to show phenomenal skill and resource in making up for the loss of his right arm. (t.w. moody, p. 20) “The first man after my father whom I ever heard denouncing landlordism,not only in Ireland but in England, was Ernest Jones” (quoted in t.w. moody, p.21) MAYO COUNTY LIBRARY www.mayolibrary.ie Fenians John O’Mahoney (far left) and James Stephens (left) (Michael Doheny, The felons track, 1951) FENIAN ACTIVIST THE IRISH REPUBLICAN to become a full-time organiser BROTHERHOOD (also known as with the IRB and was being kept the Fenian movement) was under close observation by the founded in 1858 to achieve Irish police. A police surveillance officer The Fenian banner independence by force. One of described him at the time: Has lost (Richard English, History of Ireland, 1991) the Fenian movement’s distinctive right arm; black, small moustache; below: Discovery of an arms shipment, features was the way it drew black stunted whiskers not meeting Dublin port heavily on the support of under the chin but inclining to grow (John Haney, Charles Stuart Parnell) emigrant Irish in the US and backwards towards the ears; when Britain. walking he swaggers a little and swings the left arm, he as the Davitt joined the Fenian movement slightest inclination to stoop, but is towards the end of 1865. His straight, smart, active and organisational talent was soon gentlemanly-looking; his age is recognised as he was made ‘centre’ about 30 years [he was actually 24] of an IRB ‘circle’. A ‘circle’ was a his hair is black and inclined to curl group of between 10 and 100 men (quoted in t.w. moody, p.66–7) under the command of their ‘centre’. He was arrested on 14 May, 1870 at Paddington station as he waited to Davitt took part in a failed Fenian take possession of a consignment of raid on Chester Castle in February guns he intended to ship to the 1867. Fenians in Ireland. He was convicted of treason-felony in July In 1868 he was appointed arms and sentenced to fifteen years of agent for the IRB in England and penal servitude. Scotland. He now resigned his job MAYO COUNTY LIBRARY www.mayolibrary.ie The Silent System, Millbank Workshop (Alan Evans, Finding out about law and order) IMPRISONMENT THE PENAL SYSTEM at that time public works such as building, Davitt and some twenty other divided a convict’s sentence into That weird chant of Westminster stone-cutting, brick making and Fenian prisoners were the subject three stages: solitary clock will ever haunt my memory, farming, again in strict silence. of a sustained amnesty campaign confinement, followed by the and recall that period of throughout the 1870s, led by the main part of the sentence served imprisonment when I first had to The food verged on the inedible; Irish Parliamentary Party. This in hard labour, and finally a period implore Divine Providence to Some idea can be formed of how campaign was in part responsible of release on licence or ‘ticket of preserve my reason and preserve hunger will reconcile a man to look for his early release on a ticket of leave’.