Lord George came and established himself here. He went to work systematically to improve the country, reclaiming bog-lands, building roads, and laying out the property into regular farms. He went about among the people himself, trying to get their confidence, and to let them know what he wanted to do for them, and with their help.
For a long time they wouldn’t believe him to be a lord at all, “because he spoke Irish”; and the breaking up of the rundale system, under which they had lived in higgledy-piggledy laziness, exasperated them greatly. Of the first man who took a fenced and well-defined farm from Lord George, and went to work on it, the others observed that he would come to no good by it, because he would “have to keep a maid just to talk to his wife.” Men could not be got for any wages to work at draining, or at making the “ditches” or embankments to delineate the new holdings; and when Lord George found adventurous “tramps” willing to earn a few shillings by honest work of the kind, conspiracies were formed to undo by night what was done by day. However, Lord George persevered.
There was not a shop, nor a dispensary, nor a doctor, nor a warehouse, nor a quay for landing goods in this whole populous and sea-washed region. He put up storehouses, built a little harbour at Bunbeg, established a dispensary, got a doctor to settle in the district, and finally put up the hotel in which we are. He advanced money to tenants disposed to improve their holdings. Finding the women, as usual, more thrifty and industrious than the men, and gifted with a natural aptitude for the loom and the spindle, he introduced the weaving of woollen yarn into stout frieze stuffs and foot-gear for both sexes. This was in 1840, and in 1854 Gweedore hand-knit socks and stockings were sold to the amount of £500, being just about the annual estimated rents of all the properties bought by Lord George at the time when he bought them in 1838! But with this difference: The owners from whom Lord George bought the properties got their £500 very irregularly, when they got it at all; whereas the wives and daughters of the tenants, who made the socks and stockings, were paid their £500 in cash.
Clearly in Gweedore I have a case not of the children of the soil despoiled and trampled upon by the stranger, but of the honest investment of alien capital in Irish land, and of the administration by the proprietor himself of the Irish property so acquired for the benefit alike of the owner and of the occupiers of the land.
That the deplorable state in which he found the people was mainly due to their own improvidence and gregarious incapacity is also tolerably clear. On the west coast of Norway, dear to the heart of the salmon-fisher, you find people living under conditions certainly no more favourable than here exist. North of the Hardanger Fjord, the spring opens only in June. The farmers grow only oats and barley; but they have no market except for the barley, and live chiefly by the pasturage. It is as rocky a region as Donegal. But the Norsemen never try to make the land do more than it is capable of doing. With them the oldest son takes the farm and works it. The juniors are welcome to work on the farm if they like for their brother, but they are not allowed to cut it up. There is no rundale in Norway; and when the cadets see that there is no room for them they quietly “pull up stakes,” and go forth to seek a new home, no matter where.
For fourteen years Lord George Hill spent on Gweedore all the rents he received from it, and a great deal more. During that time the relations between the people and their new landlord seem to have been, in the main, most friendly, notwithstanding his constant efforts to break up their old habits, or, to use their own language, to “bother them.” But there were no “evictions”; rents were not raised even where the tenants were visibly able to pay better rents; prizes were given annually for the best and neatest cottages, for the best crops of turnips (neither turnips, parsnips, nor carrots were there at Gweedore when Lord George bought the estate), for the best pigs (there was not a pig in Gweedore in 1838!), for calves and colts, for the best fences, the best ordered tillage farms, the best labourers’ cottages, the best beds and bedding, the best butter, the best woollen goods made on the estate. The old rundale plan of dividing up the land among the children was put a stop to, and every tenant was encouraged not to make his holding smaller, but to add to and enlarge it. A corn-mill, saw-mill, and flax-mill were established. In 1838 there was not a baker within ten miles. In 1852 the local baker was driving a good business in good bread. The tenant’s wife, for whom in 1838 a single shift was a social superiority, in 1852 went shopping at Bunbeg for the latest fashions from Derry or Dublin.
Whatever “landlordism” may mean elsewhere in Ireland, it is plain enough that in the history of Gweedore it has meant the difference between savage squalor and civilisation.
Lord George Hill died in 1879, the year in which the Land League began its operations. He bequeathed this property to his son, Captain Hill, by whom the management of it has been left to agents. After Lord George’s death two tracts of mountain pasture, reserved by him to feed imported sheep, were let to the tenants, who by that time had come to own quite a considerable number, some thousands, of live stock, cattle, horses, and sheep.
Concurrently with this concession to the tenants the provisions made by Lord George against the subdivision of holdings began to give way. Father M‘Fadden, combining the position of President of the National League with that of parish priest, seems to have favoured this tendency, and to have encouraged the putting up of new houses on reduced holdings to accommodate an increasing population. A flood which in August 1880 damaged the chapel and caused the death of five persons gave him an opportunity of bringing before the British public the condition of the people in a letter to the London Times, which elicited a very generous response, several hundred pounds, it is said, having been sent to him from London alone. Large contributions of relief were also made to Gweedore from the Duchess of Marlborough’s Fund, and Gweedore became a standing butt of British benevolence. Two results seem to have followed, naturally enough,—a growing indisposition on the part of the tenants to pay rent, and a rapid rise in the value of tenant rights. With the National League standing between them and the landlord, with the British Parliament legislating year after year in favour of the Irish tenant and against the Irish landlord, and with the philanthropic public ready to respond to any appeal for help made on their behalf, the tenants at Gweedore naturally became a privileged class. In no other way at least can I explain the extraordinary fact that tenant rights at Gweedore have been sold, according to Lord Cowper’s Blue-book of 1886, during the period of the greatest alleged distress and congestion in this district, at prices representing from forty to a hundred-and-thirty years’ purchase of the landlord’s rent!
In this Blue-book the Rev. Father M‘Fadden appears as receiving no less than £115 sterling for the tenant-right sold by him of ground, the head rent of which is £1, 2s. 6d. a year. The worst enemy of Father M‘Fadden will hardly suspect him, I hope, of taking such a sum as this from a tenant farmer for the right to starve to death by inches. [13]