Michael Davitt

Early years

Michael Davitt was born in Straide, County Mayo, Ireland, at the height of the Great Famine, the second 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. Irish was the household language, and Davitt used it later in life on a 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 77 kilometres ( 48 miles) to Haslingden, in East Lancashire. There they settled. Davitt was brought up in the closed world of a poor Irish immigrant community with strong nationalist feelings and a deep hatred of landlordism.

Child labour

After attending infant school Davitt 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 to operate a spinning machine. On 8 May 1857 his right arm was entangled in a cogwheel and 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.

Fenians

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, organising 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 11 February 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 in London on 14 May 1870 while awaiting a delivery of arms. He was convicted of treason felony and sentenced to 15 years of penal servitude in Dartmoor Prison; Davitt felt that he had not had a fair trial or the best of defence.

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. He 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 19 December 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.

Davitt rejoined the IRB and became a member of its Supreme Council. Under pressure from campaigners, the British Government had introduced a concept of "fair rents" in 1870 as a part of the first of the Irish Land Acts, but Davitt continued to hold that the common people of Ireland could not improve their lot without the ownership of their land, and frequently insisted at Fenian meetings that "the land question can be definitely settled only by making the cultivators of the soil proprietors".

In 1873, while Davitt was imprisoned his mother and three sisters had settled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1878 Davitt travelled to the United States in 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.

The Land War

In the 1880s, many people in the West of Ireland were suffering from the effects of the 1879 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, County Mayo on 20 April. 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 Roman 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%.

On 16 August 1879, the Land League of Mayo was formally founded in Castlebar, with the active support of Charles Stewart Parnell. On 21 October 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. The League organised resistance to evictions and reductions in rents, as well as aiding the work of relief agencies. Landlords' attempts to evict tenants led to violence, but the Land League denounced this.

One of the actions the Land League took during this period was the campaign of ostracism against the land agent Captain Charles Boycott in Lough Mask House outside Ballinrobe, Co Mayo, in the autumn of 1880. This campaign led to Boycott abandoning Ireland in December and coined the word boycott, which quickly spread across the world and through many languages. In 1881 Davitt was again imprisoned for his outspoken speeches after he accused the Chief Secretary for Ireland, W. E. Forster of "infamous lying". His ticket of leave was revoked and he was sent back to Portland Prison. Parnell protested in the House of Commons and the Irish members generally protested so strongly that they were ejected from the House. The government passed the Protection of Persons and Property Act 1881, allowing for internment without trial of those suspected of involvement in the Land War in Ireland, the latest in a series of around 105 suppressive laws designed to shut down protests in Ireland.

Davitt was a friend and mentor of Anna Parnell, founder of the Ladies' Land League and sister of Charles Stewart Parnell.

Travels and marriage

In an 1882 by-election Davitt was elected Member of Parliament for County Meath but was disqualified because he was in prison. On his release in 1882 he travelled to the United States with William Redmond to collect funds for the Land League, then campaigned for land nationalisation and an alliance between the British working class, Irish labourers and tenant farmers. This alienated Parnell and even many of the tenants, but after a meeting with Parnell at Parnell's house, Avondale, in September 1882 he agreed to co-operate with Parnell and set aside his plans for land nationalisation.

Davitt's support of the Irish National League, now under Parnell's and the Party's control, earned him a final spell in prison in 1883, and by 1885 his health had broken. Although only in his forties, he had become a post-revolutionary figure, and lectured on humanitarian issues in extended tours which included Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, South Africa, the Holy Land, South America, Russia and most of continental Europe, as well as almost every part of Ireland and of Britain.

In 1886 Davitt married an American, Mary Yore (b. 1861), daughter of John Yore of St. Joseph, Michigan. In 1887 he visited Wales to support land agitation. The couple returned to Ireland and lived for a while in a Land League cottage in Ballybrack, County Dublin that was presented to them as a wedding gift by the people of Ireland. They had five children – three boys and two girls, one of whom, Kathleen, died of tuberculosis aged seven in 1895. One of their sons, Robert Davitt, became a TD, while another, Cahir Davitt, became President of the High Court.

Davitt was a strong supporter of the alliance between the Liberal Party and the Irish Parliamentary Party and maintained this position in 1890 when the party split over Parnell's divorce case. Davitt, however, sided with the anti-Parnellite Irish National Federation faction in the House of Commons at Westminster, where he became hostile towards Parnell and was one of Parnell's most vociferous critics. He also became increasingly impatient with what he saw as the inability or unwillingness of the British parliament to right injustice.

Labour Federation

To further those ends he founded and edited a journal, Labour World, in September 1890, then initiated in January 1891 in Cork the Irish Democratic Labour Federation, an organisation which adopted an advanced social programme including proposals for free education, land settlement, worker housing, reduced working hours, labour political representation and universal suffrage. The Federation reflected his conviction, to which he adhered to all his life, that farmers' land proprietorship must go hand in hand with land nationalisation.

Davitt was subsequently elected for North Meath in the 1892 general election, but his election was overturned on petition. However he was promptly elected unopposed for North East Cork at a by-election in February 1893, but resigned from the Commons on 9 May of that year. At the next general election, in 1895, he stood in South Mayo, where he was returned unopposed. He welcomed Gladstone's Second Home Rule Bill as a "pact of peace" between England and Ireland. He supported the British Labour leader Keir Hardie and favoured the foundation of a Labour Party, but his commitment to the Liberal Party for the sake of Home Rule prevented him joining the new party – resulting in a breach with Hardie lasting until 1905.

Davitt resigned from the Commons again on 26 October 1899 with a prediction that no just cause could succeed there unless backed by massed agitation. Parliament alleviated this need by granting full democratic control of all local affairs, a form of "grass roots home rule", to County and District Councils under the 1898 Local Government (Ireland) Act. Davitt then co-founded in 1898 together with William O'Brien the United Irish League and organised it in Mayo and beyond. In 1899 he left his seat in parliament for good in protest against the Boer War, visiting South Africa to lend support to the Boer cause. His experiences inspired his Boer fight for Freedom, published in 1902.

Davitt's ambition that the ownership of the land would be transferred from the landlords to the tenants finally materialised after the 1902 Land Conference under O'Brien's Wyndham Land (Purchase) Act (1903), but not as he had campaigned for. He condemned the act that offered generous inducement to the landlords to sell their estates to the tenants, the Irish Land Commission mediating to then collect land annuities instead of rents, on the grounds that landlords should not receive any compensation for land which Davitt felt belonged to the state. He never gave up his adherence to land nationalisation. Later in 1906 after the Liberal Party came to power, his open support for their policy of state control of schooling, rather than denominational education, merged into a major conflict between Davitt and the Irish Catholic Church.

Davitt died in Elpis Hospital, Dublin on 30 May 1906, aged 60, from blood poisoning. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland attended the funeral, a public indication of the dramatic political journey this former Fenian prisoner had taken. The plan had been not to have a public funeral, and hence Davitt's body was brought quietly to the Carmelite Friary in Clarendon Street, Dublin. However, the next day over 20,000 people filed past his coffin. His remains were then taken by train to Foxford, County Mayo, and buried in the grounds of Straide Abbey at Straide (near Foxford), near where he was born.

Achievements

Michael Davitt's unceasing efforts were instrumental to future Irish Land Acts after the Gladstone First Land Act of 1870. The most important of these was the Land Act of 1881, which finally granted "the three Fs" under Davitt's "Irish Democratic Land Federation". The next stage was the 'Ashbourn Act (1885)'. The Ashbourne Act was the most effective land act as it offered tenants the choice to purchase their land from the government with a fixed rate, easy to pay back loan. Vast tracts of land were bought up by the government to be sold to tenants. This Act was passed by the Conservatives as an attempt to appease the Home Rule Party, although it failed to do so.

Davitt founded Labour World in 1890; the newspaper was an early promoter of the British Labour Party. His support for socialism in his latter years was based on the premise that Ireland could only achieve independence with the support of the British working class. This, along with his call for land nationalisation, often made him much misunderstood in Ireland. But he remained an inspiration for many others, such as for D. D. Sheehan's Irish Land and Labour Association (ILLA), and years later Mahatma Gandhi attributed the origin of his own mass movement of peaceful resistance in India to Davitt and the Land League.

Davitt was a brave and proud man; an ascetic who accepted no tribute for his work; on occasions impatient with those who disagreed with him; sometimes expecting too much from the farmers, as in 1885 when he described them responding in 'self-interest' rather than 'self-sacrifice’. He supported himself with writing and lectures and as a journalist defended the underprivileged, in 1903 publishing the book Within the pale: The True Story of Anti-Semitic Persecutions in Russia. This was based on reports made by him to an American newspaper in 1903 on anti-Semitic outrages in Russia and travel to Russia to investigate the incident. A pogrom was initiated in the town of Kishinev in the Russian province of Bessarabia, resulting in 51 people being killed and over 500 injured, see the Kishinev pogrom.

Back in Ireland in 1904 his Kishinevan experience of antisemitism inspired Davitt to unequivocally and passionately oppose the Limerick Boycott organised by the Redemptorist priest John Creagh: ‘I protest as an Irishman and as a Catholic against the barbarous malignancy of anti-semitism which is being introduced into Ireland under the pretended regard for the welfare of the Irish people.’

Scotland

Davitt was a frequent visitor to Scotland where he was closely associated with the crofters' struggles in the Highlands and Islands. He also urged the Irish immigrant population to integrate into the politics of their adopted country and in particular the infant Labour movement rather than to pursue a particularly Irish agenda. Davitt worked closely with John Ferguson (1836-1906), the Irish leader in Glasgow who had been involved in the Crofters' War agitation by Highland tenant farmers in the early 1880s and later in the Irish-Radical political alliance that was the forerunner of the Scottish Labour Party. Davitt made successful tours of Scotland in 1882 in 1887 denouncing landlordism. He had a major impact on Scottish Agrarianism, and movements for land reform, as well as on the Scottish labour movements. His Fenian past, prison record, and his personal story of overcoming eviction, exile, and physical disability won the attention of the Irish in Scotland. In turn Scotland helped broaden his political viewpoint, thanks to his association with Scottish nationalist and land reformer John Murdoch. These contacts led to a pan-Celtic solidarity with liberal radicalism and drew him to the radical movements in Scotland. He worked with Glasgow Irishmen Edward McHugh and Richard McGhee, which led him to the land philosophy of Henry George and provided him a political base in Glasgow.

Wales

Rumblings in the 1880s indicated that agrarian unrest was a distinct possibility in Wales. David Lloyd George and T. E. Ellis brought Davitt to Wales in 1886 to campaign for reforms. Welsh reformers often compared their plight to Ireland, even though their situation was much better. Incomes were higher in Wales, and the relationships between tenant and landowner were generally friendly. There was no question of a tension between politically deprived Catholic tenets and privileged Protestant landowners. Reform languished in Wales as farmers showed little enthusiasm; reformers were divided among themselves; economic conditions improved in the 1890s, and a few moderate reforms satisfied the Land League.

Legacy

Extracts from an article to mark the centenary of Michael Davitt's death:

Memory

Michael Davitt died at Elphis Hospital, Dublin, on May 30, 1906 of septicaemia after having a tooth extracted. He is buried in the cemetery adjacent to Straide Abbey and behind the church where he was baptized. Over Davitt's grave a Celtic Cross in his memory bears the words "Blessed is he that hungers and thirsts after justice, for he shall receive it." At Straide, the Davitt family church is now a museum that commemorates his life and works. A life-sized bronze statue stands before it.

The bridge from Achill Island to the mainland is named after him. The town of Haslingden, Lancashire, England has also commemorated Davitt's link with it through a public monument erected in the presence of Davitt's son. The inscription reads as follows:

"This memorial has been erected to perpetuate the memory of Michael Davitt with the town of Haslingden. It marks the site of the home of Michael Davitt, Irish patriot, who resided in Haslingden from 1853 to 1867. / He became a great world figure in the cause of freedom and raised his voice and pen on behalf of the oppressed, irrespective of race or creed, that serfdom be transformed to citizenship and that man be given the opportunity to display his God given talents for the betterment of mankind. / Born 1846, died 1906. / Erected by the Irish Democratic League Club, Haslingden (Davitt Branch)."

Haslingden also organised a 'Exile & Exiles' Festival in 2006 which did much to celebrate the life of Michael Davitt, as well as place it in the context of other immigrants to the community. This included 'The Jail Bird', a performance about Davitt, created by Horse and Bamboo Theatre with local school students.

The centenary of Davitt's death also saw the unveiling of a plaque at the Portree Hotel, Portree, Isle of Skye, commemorating his role in the Highland land agitation of the 1880s. The unveiling was carried out by his grandson, Fr. Tom Davitt.

A debate has also started on the extent to which Davitt altered his recall of the events in his remarkable life. One of Michael Davitt's biographers, Professor Moody, remarked in 1982 that Davitt's habit of: "..reinterpreting his past actions and attitudes in accordance with altered conditions was partly the outcome of a longing for integrity in his political conduct".

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