Feargus O’Connor – who was known as the ‘Lion of Freedom’ – led the world’s first mass working class movement. He was a colourful and controversial figure, and in Leeds he founded a newspaper called The Northern Star
TODAY, when democracy is under threat in so many places, it’s refreshing to hear about a West Cork man who supported fairly-elected parliaments, and laid the basis for modern trade unionism.
But why isn’t he commemorated in his birthplace?
Born into an aristocratic family at Connorville, near Ballineen, on July 18th, 1796, Feargus O’Connor admitted he was ‘wild’ as a boy – stealing horses, running away from home, dreaming of sailing to America. His father Roger and uncle Arthur – both members of the United Irishmen – had been equally rebellious.
In 1820, Feargus acquired Fort Robert at Dromidiclogh from his uncle Robert, and began working the farm with 100 tenants.
Getting mud on his boots, he said, helped him make the transition from ‘idle to industrious’. An active member of the Whiteboys, a secret organisation defending tenant rights, he published a pamphlet condemning the ‘tyranny of landlords and parsons’: a magistrate immediately confiscated it.
His speech in Derrigra chapel in Enniskeane in 1822 carried ‘a little spice of treason’, he confessed.
Having qualified as a barrister in London, O’Connor returned to Cork where he defended many ordinary people in court, and wrote a furious attack on ‘corrupt’ magistrates, absentee landlords and ‘oppressive’ clergy who demanded tithes to support an alien Protestant church.
The English, he said, had no clearer idea of the situation in Ireland ‘than the merest African slave’.
Sporting fiery red hair, standing 6ft tall and broadly built, O’Connor drew a huge crowd of 50,000 to Dunmanway in 1832, and arranged a campaign dinner for 500 in Enniskeane.
He was a ‘splendid mob speaker’, singling out local abuses and using humour to make his point – all very different to what some deemed Daniel O’Connell’s ‘wearisome blarney’.
People began talking of ‘Fargus’, as if he was their good friend.
Just after Christmas that year, he was resoundingly elected MP for Co Cork.
But he found himself taunted and isolated in Westminster, especially after splitting with O’Connell – ‘that little nincompoop’ – who had emancipated Catholics, but had backtracked on his promise to repeal the 1801 Act of Union, and had done nothing to give ordinary people the vote.
In Bantry in January 1834, O’Connor spoke to ‘the largest parochial meeting ever held in southern Ireland’ before riding to Skibbereen.
‘If ever a popular representative had reason to be satisfied by his reception, Mr O’Connor had,’ noted a Southern Reporter journalist. When troops killed 12 people protesting against tithes in Rathcormac that December, O’Connor announced: ‘The hour is come…!!!’
Although re-elected an MP in 1835, a committee discovered his yearly income fell way short of the £600 to qualify.
Forced to step down, he focused on building an extra-parliamentary career.
In 1835 he helped found ‘The Great Radical Association’.
Its ‘Five Cardinal Points’ comprised: the vote for every man over 21, not merely those with property; a secret ballot to prevent intimidation by landlords and employers; annual elections to hold governments to account; equally-populated constituencies; and the scrapping of the property requirement to become an MP.
It pre-dated by a few months the more famous ‘People’s Charter’ of the London Working Men’s Association – which additionally demanded MPs be paid. O’Connor also held that the ‘full-bellied fools’ and ‘natural idiots’ in the House of Lords should be replaced by representatives elected by the people.
Emerging as the leader of Chartism, O’Connor was adored by hundreds of thousands, but ‘feared and loathed by many more’ (Paul A Pickering, Feargus O’Connor, A Political life, 2008).
A statue of Feargus O’Connor in the arboretum in Nottingham.(Photo: Historic England)As he acknowledged, his name ‘literally stank’ in the noses of the British middle class.
Having settled in Leeds in Yorkshire, in 1837 he founded the Northern Star.
The weekly newspaper was read aloud in pubs, meeting rooms, and ‘humble kitchens’, and proved vital in promoting Chartist ideas throughout Britain.
A poem published in the paper on September 11th, 1840, styled O’Connor ‘The Lion of Freedom’.
In a whistle-stop tour of England and Scotland, in December 1838 and January 1839, he spoke to 300,000 people at 22 events in market squares, street corners, fields – more ‘than any man that ever lived’, he claimed. Working-class men with ‘unshorn chins, blistered hands, and fustian jackets’ were given a sense of ‘being part of something bigger’, says Pickering.
It took its toll. Exhausted, in February 1839 he fell ill, and returned to Cork.
An engraving of Feargus O’Connor by an unknown artist which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.Although the first Chartist petition was rejected that June, O’Connor fought on, until he was charged with seditious libel in May 1840 and imprisoned in York Castle.
When his supporters heard he’d been thrown into solitary confinement, they were outraged, and he gained the reputation of a martyr. After his release in August 1841, he again returned to Ireland.
Following the rejection of a second petition in 1842, O’Connor turned his attention towards a Land Plan.
He proposed that 5,000 families, chosen by lottery, should be settled on 40 small farming communities bought by shares in a land company.
‘It will be the proudest day of my life’, he proclaimed, when he saw the first families entering their ‘own castles’. In 1846 land was purchased for the first estate in Hertfordshire, known as ‘O’Connorville’. Four other estates followed. Critics maintained he was trying to turn back the tide to a pre-industrial age.
To celebrate his return to Parliament as Nottingham’s MP in 1847, he appeared in a flamboyant waistcoat, and claimed he’d been ‘promoted from the ranks of the aristocracy, to a commission in the democracy’. But in 1848 a third Chartist petition was rejected.
Although O’Connor claimed it contained almost six million signatures, it actually included less than two million, with many forgeries. In a second blow, his utopian land scheme was judged to be operating illegally.
After selling the Northern Star in 1851, he was back to Ireland, where growing numbers believed the country’s salvation could only be achieved by force.
Worn out by years of campaigning, O’Connor’s flaming red hair had turned white, and he’d become overly fond of brandy – he was drinking up to 15 glasses a day. His behaviour was now increasingly bizarre: he tried bribing a court official with a mutton chop, and suggested ladies grew beards.
His assaults on a fellow MP and a policeman led to his speedy ejection from the Commons and confinement in an asylum in Chiswick, West London. In 1855, his sister Harriet had him released into her care, but on August 30th he died at her house in Notting Hill.
O’Connor’s grave in Kensal Green Cemetery in London. A crowd of 40,000 attended his funeral, breaking open the gates to get closer to their hero.
The persistence of the ‘honest aristocrat’ showed how ordinary people could successfully publicise their grievances, and pressurise governments by organising rallies.
This encouraged the growth of self-help organisations and trade unions, and inspired the Fenians, whose 1867 proclamation refers to universal suffrage, aristocrats stealing land, and workers regaining their freedom. By 1918, five of the Charter’s six demands – all except annual elections – had been achieved.
Today, there are two monuments to Feargus O’Connor, both in England: one over
his grave in Kensal Green Cemetery, another in Nottingham Arboretum.
But in Ireland, there’s nothing – only a stone to his father and uncle near Manch Bridge. Cattle graze beneath the walls of Fort Robert, and very little remains of the chapel at Derrigra, Enniskeane, where he made his first speech.
The ‘Spirit of Mother Jones’ festival coordinator and fellow West Corkman Gerard O’Mahony is bewildered.
‘He does not deserve to be left in obscurity ... many of the democratic rights we now take for granted were demanded by Feargus almost 200 years ago. History should treat him a little better.’
• Thanks to Gerard O’Mahony for his help with this article
