Cruelty of UK’s most hated man
QUESTION Why was the Marquess of Clanricarde ‘the most unpopular man in the United Kingdom’?
THIS was the 2nd Marquess of Clanricarde, Hubert George de Burgh-Canning (1832-1916), a notorious miser and eccentric who never visited his Irish landholdings and treated his tenants with cruelty.
Clanricarde’s mother was a daughter of George Canning, the prime minister. His uncle, Lord Canning, was Viceroy of India at the time of the 1857 Indian Rebellion. Having no children of his own, he left his nephew a large fortune.
On April 10, 1874, Clanricarde inherited six noble titles and became the owner of Portumna Castle in Galway, along with an estate of some 57,000 acres.
Clanricarde resided in London, in a luxurious apartment in the Albany building, off Piccadilly.
Meanwhile, his estates and tenants suffered neglect. On June 29, 1882, his land agent John Henry Blake was assassinated. In August 1886 a number of his tenants were brutally evicted for non-payment of rent.
His estates became the focus of the Land War, a period of agrarian agitation when local tenants tried to obtain fair rents. Despite the urging of successive chief secretaries of Ireland, Sir Michael Hicks Beach and Arthur James Balfour, Clanricarde refused to compromise and continued to evict his tenants.
He contemptuously dismissed Wyndham’s Land Act of 1903, a scheme that provided terms for voluntary sale on terms favourable to both owners and tenants. Augustine Birrell’s Irish Evicted Tenants Bill of 1907, which sought compulsory purchase of land from absentee landlords, stirred Clanricarde into action and he made his one and only speech in the House of Lords.
On August 6, 1907, peers and journalists gathered to witness this despised figure give his oration. The journalist Michael MacDonagh described ‘a faded, fragile, wizened figure, leaning heavily on a stout and shabby umbrella as he ambled feebly along, looking straight ahead and apparently seeing nothing’.
Clanricarde’s oration was full of flowery rhetoric but undermined by his weak delivery.
Clanricarde’s recalcitrance resulted in the 1909 Land Act that enabled district boards to acquire lands by compulsion. By July 1915 many of Clanricarde’s properties had been finally removed from his care, resulting in a considerable financial loss.
Clanricarde was himself kicked out of the Albany because of a dispute with his landlords over rent.
Jonathan sewell, Pembroke.
QUESTION Have the Devil’s Hoof Prints ever been explained?
THE DEVIL’S Hoof Prints refers to a phenomenon that occurred in February 1855 in Devon. It involved a series of hoof-like marks found in the snow, covering a distance of around 100 miles across the county, seemingly appearing overnight.
The tracks were small, cloven hooflike impressions about four inches long, arranged in a single file, and appeared to pass over rooftops, as if the creature creating them had ignored obstacles in its path. The phenomenon sparked a national conversation as to their origin.
Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post was the first newspaper to report the tracks, describing: ‘An excitement worthy of the dark ages’ with ‘foottracks of a most strange and mysterious description’.
The national debate played out in the Illustrated London News. The naturalist Richard Owen proclaimed that the footmarks were the hind foot of a badger. One writer believed they were the tracks of a great bustard, another suggested that they were the tracks of a rat leaping through the snow.
A tongue-in- cheek contribution claimed that the tracks were those of the unipede, a rarely sighted mammal that had been spotted by the Icelandic explorer Biom Herjolfsson in Labrador in AD 1001.
Geoffrey Household, who edited a small book on all correspondence on the matter, believed that they were the tracks left by two shackles trailing from a balloon that had escaped its moorings.
Keith Moore, Honiton, Devon.
QUESTION Who invented dummies for babies?
SMALL clay dummies, which featured a small hole from which a baby could suck honey, have been found in Cypriot graves dating back to about 1000 BC.
In 17th to 19th-century Britain, a ‘coral’ was a teething toy made of coral, ivory or bone, often mounted in silver as the handle of a rattle.
The modern rubber dummy with the rubber teat, shield and handle design was patented by Manhattan pharmacist Christian W. Meinecke in 1901 as ‘Baby Comforter’.
Mrs sarah White, Newcastle upon Tyne.