William O'Connor Morris

The author of the brief biographical note in the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), provided us with an over-view of the life of that well-known author and Irish County Court judge and historian who lived at Gortnamona or Mount Pleasant, overlooking Pallas Lake near Tullamore. His beautiful house with its fine library was destroyed during the Civil War, as part of the then process of eliminating the demesne lands of local landlords so as to make it available for a carve-up among the local land-hungry local men.

William O'Connor Morris was born in the city of Kilkenny on 26th November 1824 and was the son of Benjamin Morris, sometime Rector of Rincurran in the Diocese of Cork and Cloyne and Elizabeth, youngest daughter and co-heiress of Morris Nugent O'Connor of Gortnamona. Described in the DNB as a delicate boy, he was placed when 10 years of age under the care of a physician at Bromley in Kent. From 1837 to 1841 he was at a private school at Epsom, after 1841 at a school in South Wales, where he studied classics and history. In 1843 he entered Oriel College, Oxford, and in the summer of 1844 he was elected as scholar. Due to straitened circumstances on the family's Irish estate, because of the Great Famine, he was obliged to take 1½ years away from his studies (1846 - 7), but returned in the autumn of 1847 to obtain a second class degree the following year. His father had died in 1846 and Morris, having abandoned an early liking for a military career, raised, three years after leaving Oxford, the necessary fee of £100 to enter the King's Inn, Dublin as a law student. He was called to the Irish Bar in 1854 and choosing the home circuit (which would now include the Midlands), he gradually worked his way upwards and in 1862 he was elected Professor of Common and Criminal Law in the King's Inns. The following year he was appointed a commissioner to investigate the rights of owners of fixed nets for salmon in Ireland but resigned soon afterwards because of a difference between himself and Sir Robert Peel, the Third Baronet, and then Chief Secretary. The County Court judgeship was later given to him and he regarded it as amends for the injustice which he saw perpetrated on himself arising from the circumstances surrounding his retirement as a commissioner.

In the meantime he married and established himself at Blackrock and through his wife inherited the estate at Gortnamona. He began about this time to write for the various literary reviews and for The Times, he reviewed books mainly on military history - a favourite subject of study. As a landlord he paid close attention to the conditions of land tenure in Ireland and Morris, at the request of the then editor of The Times, Delane, contributed a series of special articles on the subject to The Times. Travelling through the country, he collected his information at first hand and his letters in The Times (reprinted in 1870 with a map) advised the legal recognition of Ulster tenant right wherever it existed. The Land Act of 1870, though not entirely to his satisfaction, embodied many of his ideas. In 1872 he was appointed County Court Judge to the county of Louth and after six years he was transferred to Co. Kerry where the change did not prove agreeable. He had no sympathy with the Home Rule movement and detested the accompanying agrarian agitation, which was violent in Kerry. In 1880 he moved with his family from Dublin to Gortnamona and was, at his own request, transferred in 1886 to the County Court judgeship of the united counties of Sligo and Roscommon. His position there was easier than it had been in Kerry but his attitude to the de Freyne tenants in 1901 and his wider comments on politicians at that time, drew hostile criticism.

Thereafter Morris devoted himself to literary work and published a number of historical treatises on such subjects as Hannibal and Napoleon. The DNB biographer, (possibly Robert Dunlop) said of him that 'he wrote too much and too superficially to become an authority of first rank on either military or Irish history. He had no personal experience of military affairs, and except in the case of Ireland of his own day, his knowledge of Irish history was largely second-hand. His style was that of an accomplished journalist, content for the most part to build on other men's foundations;'

He died on 3rd August 1904 at Gortnamona.

See DNB Volume 2 pp 2803-4. A brief note on the family will be found in Burke's Landed Gentry 1912 (page 496 - 7).

The Rev. Benjamin Morris born 1790; married 24th October 1822, Elizabeth fourth daughter and co-heir of Morris Nugent O'Connor, Mount Pleasant, Co. Offaly and by her (who died 24th November 1861) had issue, (i) William O'Connor, late of Gortnamona, (ii) Morris O'Connor, late Deputy Post Master General of the Island of Jamaica.

The Rev. Benjamin Morris died 30th October 1846 [during the height of the Irish Famine, and his death and the subsequent disorder in the Morris estate would have led to William O'Connor Morris' return from Oxford and a sojourn in Ireland for upwards of eighteen months. We have the benefit of this in his memoir Memories and Thoughts of a Life published in London in 1895.

On the O'Connor side, the late County Court Judge claimed descent from one, Colonel John O'Connor of Cappagherane or Gortnamona, who was M.P. for the Borough of Philipstown in the 1689 Parliament and was supposedly slain at the Battle of Aughrim. This Colonel had three sons, Maurice, Gerard and Thomas. The eldest son, Maurice, gave the modern name Mount Pleasant to a portion of the family estate and married c. 1725 Mary, the third daughter of Peter, the Fourth Earl of Fingall and had issue, John O'Connor of Mount Pleasant, High Sheriff of King's County in 1759 and who married in 1752, Mary, the eldest daughter of Richard Malone, Serjeant at Law, and niece of the Right Honourable Anthony Malone of Baronstown in the County of Westmeath. The eldest son of this marriage was Morris Nugent O'Connor, also of Mount Pleasant, High Sheriff of King's County in 1783 and High Sheriff of Westmeath in 1797. He married, in 1794, Maria, the eldest daughter of Sir Thomas Burke of Marblehill in the County Galway. Morris Nugent O'Connor died in 1814 and was succeeded in his estates by his four daughters as co-heirs with the King's County estate of Mount Pleasant becoming vested through the marriage of the youngest daughter Elizabeth to Mr. O'Connor Morris. The old County Court Judge, as stated above, died in August 1904 and was succeeded by his son Morris Lindsay O'Connor and three surviving daughters.

The Irish Land Question

I had an opportunity recently to look through the volume entitled Letters on the Land Question of Ireland, published by William O'Connor Morris in London, 1870. The copy I looked at was owned by Thomas F. Rahilly and was dated Listowel 1884. In his introduction, O'Connor Morris stated that the book consisted of a series of letters on the Land Question of Ireland, written at the request of the proprietors of The Times, with the first 25 letters recording the impressions of the conditions of the landed classes in Ireland and of their relations with each other, of the state of the country and of the feeling of the people. In the course of his tour, he visited several of the midland, southern and western counties, and ended his tour with a visit to the North. Writing of the King's and Queen's Counties, he saw them as peaceful and an example of the stronger will of the conquering race over that of a weaker race, saying that Laois and Offaly were subdued by the Earl of Sussex under circumstances of atrocious cruelty and that 'a swarm of English colonists was introduced into what was then a desolate waste; the possessions of the vanquished were made shire land, and called the King's and Queen's Counties; and the little forts of Maryborough and Philipstown, planted in the midst of the barren wildernesses, commemorated the names of the royal subjugators.' The region he described, as now a large agricultural tract, still to a great extent held by the descendants of the colonists of the Tudors. Maryborough, or Portlaoise, he described as a poor town, without a single feature that deserved notice. Mountmellick at a small distance, seemed to be a busy and thriving place, and Portarlington, though little more than a village, was not without interest because of its Huguenot connection. Travelling on the railway line from Portarlington to Athlone, he saw the area as a dreary and comparatively sterile tract and of a general character that is 'barren and melancholy'. It is for the most part a vast and even plain of poor and unkindly land, in places divided by huge turf mosses and ridged by lines of these low steep hillocks known in parts of England by the name of hogs' backs. Passing along the railway line to Geashill brought him to recount the story of the management of the estate by Lord Digby's agent, William Steuart Trench, who had just recently (1868) published his well-known book Realities of Irish Life, in which he gave a varnished account of his work on behalf of Lord Digby in reorganising the estate and evicting tenants from wasteland.

His view of the Digby Estate at Geashill

The story of the upset at Geashill in the 1850s, caused by the death of Lord Digby and it being found that his successor could break long leases which were legally invalid was recounted by Mr. O'Connor Morris described in his book published in 1870, Letters on the Land Question in Ireland in summary as follows:

"The late Earl Digby, the immediate predecessor of the present peer, was an absentee who seldom visited his Irish estate; and towards the close of the last century he, being then merely a tenant for life, made at different times a great many leases for terms considerably beyond his powers. As Lord Digby was a gentleman in every sense of the word, this unfortunate mistake can be ascribed only to the negligence of a non-resident owner; but the tenants relied with implicit confidence on the supposed security of their interests; and, as Lord Digby lived down to 1855-6, and during all this period they were undisturbed, many of them made very great improvements, and, in point of fact, created on the land a considerable amount of additional property. Lord Digby's successor, who, it should be observed, was not a near relation, and was not under any obligations to the deceased nobleman, thought himself justified, on coming into the estate, in availing himself of his strict rights, and destroying titles which, not being consistent with the provisions of the entail, were, technically speaking, wholly invalid.

Ejectment proceedings were commenced, or threatened, against the whole body of the lessees - 120 families, I believe - and the question of compensating those who were thus about being extruded from the homes they had innocently enriched for the benefit of a stranger was referred to the executors of the late Earl, who, it should be remarked, were, in point of law, most probably not bound to disburse one farthing. The whole country was in a state of uproar, when Mr. Trench [Lord Digby's agent], by his judicious conduct, in some degree calmed down the agitated waters. He succeeded in persuading the executors to allot a sum of £30,600 in relief of the imperiled tenants, and many of them, I understand, were allowed to retain their lands, at rents, however, considerably increased. Yet, from all that I have heard, the sum given in compensation was not nearly an equivalent to the losses of the lessees; and the memory of the whole transaction is not forgotten in the barony of Geashill."

It is likely that under existing law, of the Doctrine of Estopel developed by Lord Denning, that the leaseholders would not lose out in the fashion that they did, having relied on their titles and their improvements. O'Connor Morris noted that the Digby tenants had accepted their leases and had not the means of discovering their defects because it was common practice in Ireland that unless perhaps when a fine or penalty was paid, an ordinary lessee had no right to examine beforehand his lessor's or landlord's title. 'After a possession of more than half a century, and the expenditure of a vast sum of money on the validity of their rights, the representatives of these men were suddenly threatened with eviction en masse.' O'Connor Morris compares things with an English estate and stated that 'for I say it with confidence, whoever heard of 120 leaseholders on one English estate, after having enjoyed their lands for generations, and added enormously to their value, being threatened with being turned out e body, not for any misconduct or default, but simply because there was a flaw in their titles'.

Going on to describe the area between Geashill and Tullamore, O'Connor Morris noted that the train reaches Tullamore, the modern capital of the King's County. Its rival, Philipstown [Daingean, the old county capital] being almost buried in the vast morasses that extend around it. The pretentious courthouse of Tullamore was the scene not long ago of a trial that has become a cause celebre in the literature of the Irish land question. At this point, O'Connor Morris went on to speak of a case described as Clarke -v- Knox, which related to the position of a tenant at will and a deceitful landlord. O'Connor Morris had no more to say on the Tullamore area, which was a pity, with regard to his knowledge of the place and perhaps it was for this reason that he had little to write of being so familiar with the territory. Of Mullingar he later wrote 'Twenty years ago Mullingar seemed as if smitten with mouldering decay. It had the look of haggard poverty; its slovenly ways and ricketty houses were notable for their squalor and dilapidation. Small as the place now is, the main street and its shops have generally a rather thriving appearance. You see plenty of new gilding and paint; there are numerous residences of recent building, and though the neighbourhood is purely agricultural and its local business has not much increased, few country towns I believe in Leinster have lately shown more signs of improvement. The reason for this change I cannot doubt is the alteration in the legal conditions and in some degree the social influences, under which the town now maintains its existence. Until not long ago Mullingar was held under a middleman's grant from the Granard family, and as neither the mesne nor the chief owners had the power of making long leases, no security could be obtained for building, and stagnation and ruin were the consequence. The liberality of the present Lord Granard, and ultimately the process of the Landed Estates Court, swept away these mischievous fetters of tenure; and the new proprietor, Colonel Greville Nugent, being able and willing to give leases of long duration on favourable terms, the town has not been slow to revive, and has in a few years made very rapid progress."

For another view on the clearances at Geashill, the reader can consult The Land War in Ireland by James Godkin which was also published in London, 1870.

Steuart Trench is given a less easy ride in Godkin's chapter relating to Geashill. "Lord Digby leveled cottages, gardens, farms, manured the land, got an enormous crop, which in one year paid all the expenses; and then laid out the land in vast tracts of pasture, for which he gets some 30-40 shillings an acre. This is an improvement for him, but not for the people, not for the country, not for the state, not for the Queen. It may crush Ribbonism. But for every Ribbonman crushed, one hundred Fenians spring up". [Page 396].

A modern-day brief comment on the evictions at Geashill will be found in W. E. Gaughan, Landlords and Tenants in mid-Victorian Ireland, (Oxford, 1994), where writing of evictions he says that some evictions were controversial, not so much because of their harshness but because they challenged notions of what the proper management of estates, one such being that of Geashill where in 1857, a large number of evictions were reported by the constabulary: '242 compared with 9 in the previous year and 38 in the next - a clear sign that a clearance had taken place". These evictions, Gaughan noted, attracted the attention partly because they showed how tenants could fall foul of the law and partly because of the agents "flamboyance".

Memoirs of William O'Connor Morris

Returning to what we started with, the account of William O'Connor Morris, Morris notes in his introduction that his father, Benjamin Morris, had witnessed some part of the 1798 Rebellion and that his mother was a daughter and co-heiress of Morris Nugent O'Connor of Mount Pleasant or Gartnamona [Gortnamona], the old Irish name, near Blueball, Tullamore. The old judge states that Mr. O'Connor, his grandfather, by marriage, was a well-known personage in the Ireland of his day and that he was the representative of the heads of the Great Clan of the O'Connors of Offaly, who for three centuries were the terrors of the Pale. He goes on to say that the old Colonel of the 1690s was killed at the Battle of Aughrim but that "the O'Connors, however, have been true to their blazon; the uprooted oak still has green branches". This is a reference to the shield, part of the coat of arms which can be seen in MacLysaght's Irish Families. He was the O'Connor who was killed at the Battle of Aughrim, he is said to have been, about 1720, the owner of three divisions of land at Tunbridge Wells -Mount Sion, Mount Ephram and Mount Pleasant - and that selling all these lands at Tunbridge he regained a portion of the O'Connor demesne, calling the place Mount Pleasant, perhaps in account of his associations with the gay town of Kent. The judge's mother was Elizabeth, the youngest daughter of Morris Nugent O'Connor, who died in 1818, leaving four daughters as his co-heirs. In the first two chapters of his book, O'Connor Morris describes how he was born at Kilkenny in 1824 and how his family left Newtown in 1840, bidding farewell to the county of Kilkenny and that under arrangements, he had much reason to regret, his father became owner of his wife's estate and that of her sister's in the King's County at Gortnamona. It was described as "an oasis, like other spots of the kind, arising out of a vast tract of poor hills and of uplands, hemmed in by far-spreading peat mosses, which, edged on one side by the arising of the Slieve Blooms, and on the other by the great lakes of Westmeath and bounded towards the east by the huge Bog of Allen, formed by the ancient region of Leix and Offaly, the King's and Queen's Counties of Philip and Mary". The judge described the house at Gortnamona (destroyed in 1922) as a "nearly square house in the bad style of the first years of the century [erected 1803] and rising along the shore of the lake but with the demesne laid out along the shore of the lake called Pallas". Of his teenage times at Gortnamona, little of it was taken up in hunting, but the shooting was fair, especially with the noble O'Connor setters of which specimens were still extant in 1896 when the memoir was published. Pallas Lake would have roused the Thames angler to ecstasy "huge pike lurked in its sedgy recesses; it contains perch that occasionally ran to five pounds: and its tench were the largest in the three kingdoms".

Recollections of the Famine Years in Offaly

O'Connor Morris went up to Oxford in 1843 and was elected a scholar of Oriel College in the summer of 1844. He had to return to Ireland because of the Great Famine at home, shortage of funds arising from the fall in rents and because of ill-health. He notes that after a lapse of nearly a year and a half, he returned to Oriel to read for his degree in the autumn of 1847. Owing to the Irish Famine, he was in such want of money that he could only pay a teacher for a single term and did not obtain a First "and had to content myself with a Second Class, an honour of far inferior distinction". He left the university in the summer of 1848 and returned to Ireland.

In chapter 4 of his book, O'Connor Morris dealt with the Irish Famine, which he described as occurring over the period 1845-1847, whereas nowadays, one would generally associate the Famine with the years 1845-1849.

'I spent my long vacation at Gartnamona; and the circumstances even of my father's estate gave me some insight into the existing condition of the relations of landlord and tenant in Ireland, and especially into the position of the mass of the peasantry. My father was one of the best-hearted of men; my mother represented the old race of O'Connor; and neither one nor the other ever did an act of wrong or harshness to those dependent on them. They were, nevertheless, by law and usage almost absolute over those who dwelt on their lands; they were separated from them in every way, and their attitude to them was that of kindly superiors to a class that still bore the marks of serfdom. This necessarily had a degrading effect on the inferiors, of whom they were the rulers. These, I have said, were cringing in bearing and manner, and yet sometimes morose and sullen; the sturdy independence and self-respect of the English peasant was not to be found in them. One instance of this I well recollect. My father was zealous of improving his lands; he was desirous of enclosing a tract of bog, in which his tenantry had rights of turf; and he proposed to give them the same rights on another tract, making the first a plantation of Scotch fir and larch. At the meeting that followed, "Her Royal Lady" and "His Royal Honour" were piteously adjured "not to do a thing an O'Connor would never have done;" but a threatening letter came afterwards by way of protest. My father judiciously gave up his project; the bog remains a treeless waste to this hour.

The condition of the peasantry on the estate, however, and of the lands occupied and tilled by them, was the point that chiefly fixed my attention. I had noticed, I have remarked, from childhood, the immense difference between the English and the Irish landscape in every feature denoting wealth and prosperity, and the contrast seemed more striking as I progressed in years. My father's estate was rather a good specimen of estates in the Midland Irish counties; it had never been possessed by harsh landlords; its owners had been nearly always resident; it had not been cut up into little patches for the manufacture of voters for the Irish Parliament. But the husbandry of the farms was extremely backward; the crops of wheat, barley, and oats were poor; the culture of the turnip was almost unknown; and the scene, for the most part, was one of small fields, given up to the potato, and badly tilled. The wooden plough, too, had not disappeared; the breeds of horses and stock were very inferior, and the lands were crumpled up into petty enclosures, divided by ragged ugly fences, and in many places much in need of drainage. On the whole tract, comprising some two thousand acres - apart from the large and secluded demesne - there were scarcely three tenants who held thirty, and the remaining occupiers were poor peasants, holding patches of land, in all cases small, and dwindling down to two or three acres. Outside this class was that known as the cottars, dwellers in mud cabins, and for the most part landless, who eked out existence on the wages they received for their labour on my father's home-farm, wages then not more then not more than six shillings a week. The whole estate was thus thickly peopled, though not so much so as estates at hand, and the occupants were nearly all on the verge of poverty. Even the larger possessors were badly clad; the class beneath them often appeared in rags; bread and meat were almost unknown luxuries, and the potato was the one staple of food. This root, indeed, formed the main if not the only support of all that was then contained in a rustic home, human beings, cattle, and the omni-present pig; and it often stood in place of wages, and even of currency. Yet, low as was the state of the dwellers on the soil, the competition for the possession of land was intense; this necessarily forced up the rate of rent, and it caused large sums to be paid for the good-will for farms. I often heard my father say that he was compelled to make a bargain against himself on the letting of land; and this has been my own experience for many years.'...

With these facts before me, I witnessed in 1845 the first great failure of the treacherous root which was the staff of life for the very poor in Ireland. I was out partridge-shooting on a September morning, when, to my astonishment, I found all the potato fields black; the plants had been smitten with a sudden blight; they emitted a sickly smell of corruption. The same sight met me wherever I walked; and I was soon attracted by groups of terrified peasants, who were bending over their stricken crop, which for many constituted their only food. The men looked gloomily and sadly on, but the Celtic wail went forth from women and children, and tears ran down many a sun burnt cheek at the thought of a great coming if unseen calamity. I went straight home, and can well call to mind how I held forth to my father and mother that an evil day was at hand for the humbler classes, and that the country was perhaps on the verge of a great trial.'...

'The blight of the potato in 1845 was not attended with the worst results in the more advanced and prosperous parts of Ireland. The oat crop of the year was an extremely good one; perhaps half the potatoes were saved; and in the midland and eastern counties there was nothing resembling a complete dearth of food. Rents indeed failed, and were largely remitted, the poorhouses in some unions were filled; the price of the necessaries of life went up, and there was a great and increasing amount of distress. But many of the landlords of the better class gave employment on a most liberal scale, and thus relieved their poorest dependants; this was the case at Gartnamona, at Desart, [the home of his aunt in Co. Kilkenny] and at Sonna, [the residence of the Tuite family in Co. Westmeath] the three country-houses I knew best, and these were but specimens of a very general movement...'

1846 a terrible loss broke up for the first time the circle of our home. My father died after few weeks' illness. I have briefly described his kindly nature; he is not yet forgotten by a few surviving friends. His purchase of Gartnamona, however, had been unfortunate; he had DI entangled in many transactions which his family never completely unraveled, and which led to one unhappy estrangement at least, and my mother and I were left the owners of an embarrassed heritage in a season of dire distress. I left Oxford, where I had been for a few days only, in the autumn of that disastrous year, and during the next twelve months was engaged in managing the family estate under the worst circumstances, and in confronting the great famine of 1846.'

The summer of that year I had spent at home, and having been on visits at different country-houses, had seen the first symptoms of the dread catastrophe, though I had not been in a distressed district. Even in the midland counties, however, the prospect became alarming in the extreme. As early as the month of July [1846] the potato failed in all parts of Ireland, the plants were everywhere smitten with the devouring blight, and Leinster fared as badly as Munster and Connaught. As an example of the destruction, I may remark, that out of a crop of fourteen acres, our home-farm yielded two cartloads only of tubers that could be deemed fit for food; the rest was a mass of noisome rottenness; and it was the same on all lands that came under my eye. The oat crop, too, was nearly a half short, and before autumn had closed it had become apparent that not only the poorer parts of Ireland - already stricken in 1845 - but that her best cultivated and most wealthy districts were threatened with general and appalling famine. The spectacle, indeed, I often saw in these months - wide expanses of withered and hideous fields, peasants fleeing already their homes in bands, far-spreading mourning and universal gloom - was prophetic of frightful misery at hand. The land seemed stricken as if by the plagues of Egypt.

I shall briefly set down what I saw myself in the memorable and awful crisis that followed. Gartnamona, I have remarked, was a fair specimen of rather an improved estate in the midland counties. The same may have been said of many estates in the neighbourhood, and King's County, if not a fertile tract, was by no means a backward part of Leinster. But within two months after the harvest of 1846, the poorhouse of Tullamore, the county town, was crammed by inmates driven from their homes by want. Hundreds of acres of land were already desolate and many cottages left vacant; a cry for food had gone forth from despairing multitudes, and the faces of the peasantry had begun to wear a look, cadaverous and haggard, that showed the touch of famine. Even in a comparatively prosperous tract thousands stood on the brink of sheer starvation, and the State had to deal with a frightful disaster, even now spreading over all parts of Ireland'...

Describing the public works carried out during the Famine years, O'Connor Morris had little to say in their favour and wrote of them:

'As the people, however, were not to be left to starve, they set on foot in almost every part of Ireland a system of wholly unproductive works, in nearly all instances the construction of roads, and those who needed relief were summoned to work on these, avowedly and completely useless as they were, and to earn the wages required to support their families. This expedient unquestionably was the means of rescuing hundreds of thousands of the poor from famine, and just praise is due for this to the Government. But it was almost forced on the landed gentry, who saw its evils, and were not consulted. The demoralisation it caused was frightful; it covered the land with a host of jobbing officials, and the cost and the waste it produced was enormous. At last, when this system, of which the charge was largely imposed, be it observed, on the land, was taxing the Treasury at the rate of five millions a year, another was adopted to meet the crisis. The making of the worthless roads was given up, but while the workhouse test was applied as sternly as possible, a gigantic scheme of outdoor relief was devised in order to bring food to the homes of the people. This scheme was worked through local committees distributing supplies of cooked food, and this again certainly saved thousands from the grave. But the relief was soon followed by a harsh provision, that applicants should be shut out from it if they retained the possession of even a plot of land; and this, which was part of a general policy to transform landed relations in Ireland, drove thousands of peasants from their little dwellings, and lifted them up in masses from the soil. The State said to them in effect, "Quit your homes, or starve".'

'I witnessed what occurred, in this position of affairs, in a considerable part of the King's County. The cost of the necessaries of life became prodigious, for the State did not attempt to supply the market; the price of oats and wheat was, perhaps, doubled; that of the turnip, which, in a slight degree, replaced the potato as food, was, I think, quadrupled. Around Gartnamona, and everywhere else, swarms of peasants were for some months engaged in cutting up fields to make roads and fences, unfinished to this hour, and well-nigh effaced; and the work they did listlessly, was little more than nominal. Vast sums were expended in these useless tasks, and were largely intercepted by pay-clerks, inspectors, and numerous functionaries of the kind; and the gentry, on the spot, had no voice in the matter. I repeat, however, many were saved from death, even in a district rather above the average, and this must be borne in mind by every impartial person who examines the acts of the Government of the day.

In February 1847, as well as I recollect, the road works, as they were called, ceased, and I was made the Chairman of the Local Committee for the distribution of food to the poor in the neighbourhood. My chief fellow-labourers were the parish priest and the parson, then, as unhappily is not the case now, willing to act together in a good work; and for some five months we doled out rations of boiled maize to about three hundred applicants, the average number upon our lists. The lean and wolfish faces of many of these are stamped on my mind even as I write, and but for this relief they would probably have nearly all perished. Meanwhile hundreds of peasants, some of the better sort, abandoned their farms, saving what they could, in order to emmigrate to the United States, and the petty cottars were largely driven from their homes, for otherwise they could not obtain food. On our estate, about twenty families out of seventy disappeared in a few month; and in the King's County, as in all parts of Ireland, the great exodus of the Irish race set in, under conditions that, even in favoured districts, afflicted all who beheld the spectacle. The roads were crowded with terrified human beings, flocking, with their household stuff, to the nearest port, as if before the march of an invading army.

I do not think it can be said, with truth, that there were deaths from starvation in my immediate neighbourhood; the distress and wretchedness were indeed frightful, but the community was not ravaged by actual famine. But typhus, following in the train of want, became epidemic, and had many victims; and the substitution of a cereal for a root as food caused a great mortality among aged persons. At Tullamore, as everywhere else in the country, fever sheds were run up, and had hundreds of sufferers; and I can record that every applicant above sixty-five who received relief from our Local Committee died within the year. Society, too, in the King's County was not broken up to a very great extent, as it was completely in other counties; and if there was an immense increase of ordinary crime, as was inevitable at a crisis of the kind, there was no such outbreak of agrarian troubles as was witnessed in parts of Munster and Connaught. As for the attitude of the upper classes during the terrible ordeal, it was on the whole praiseworthy;'...

'On the other hand, as regards the Midland Counties, the conduct of the landed gentry was in the main admirable. Rents were not exacted, or indeed asked for, and arrears were struck off in thousands of cases. The landlords of the King's County were not wealthy as a class, and on many estates they did not possess the means to give the employment they gave in the preceding season. The more opulent, however, certainly did so, and to this day many works of drainage and planting attest what they then accomplished'...

'As for my mother and myself, we were too poor to imitate examples of this kind; but we sold horses and carriages, scarcely thought of rents, and happily did not evict a single tenant. My mother, too, hit on an expedient, useful alike to ourselves and to the poor around us. She sent none of the produce of the home farm to market, but stored it in barns, out-houses, and even in rooms in the house - the drawing-room, I recollect, was a granary of oats - and she sold it at somewhat less than the current price to our poor dependants and their immediate neighbours. She rather gained than lost by this kindly conduct; and I have thought how well it might have been had the State attempted to do something of the kind in the case of the sensitive Irish people. On the whole, within my own experience at least - and it happened to extend over a large district - the upper classes in Ireland did their duty; they made great sacrifices in this season of trial, and exhibited sympathy and good feeling, as a general rule, to the suffering poor; and, in fact, the divisions which kept them apart from these, were, to a considerable extent, effaced, in the presence of disasters that appealed to all hearts. I dwell on this subject, because designing men have of late been denouncing the Irish gentry as reckless and wicked in the famine of 1846.'...

As regards the contribution from central government and from charitable organisations to Co. Offaly, William O'Connor Morris took the view that Co. Offaly had no need of the worldwide charity which flowed into the Famine stricken districts and which saved many thousands from the grasp of hunger.

Reviewing his comments on the Famine, he said that he had dwelt on the events of the Great Famine because the results had been immense and far-reaching and were still at work in the Ireland of his day. A great social revolution had taken place with 2,500,000 fleeing the land and the population regularly on the decline.

O'Connor Morris is right in that even today the Famine is regarded as a watershed in the history of Irish society in the 19th century.

Subsequent to the Famine years, O'Connor Morris became a barrister and was called to the Bar in 1854. O'Connor Morris writes: 'I was at Gartnamona during the next few years, the dregs that may be called of the Famine. I have made up my mind to go to the Irish Bar, but the poverty of the gentry was such, that I have not £100 to pay the necessary fees, and, in spite of myself I had to live in the country' - he involved himself in local affairs, attending the Petty Sessions, and the Assizes as a Grand Juror.

Of the aftermath of the Famine he wrote that 'the country had by degrees been recovering from the effects of the Famine and was putting on a new and more happy aspect. The torrent of emigration indeed still ran, bearing away thousands of peasants in its course; and even in the King's County you could see roads often darkened with human waifs and strays hurrying to join the first masses of emigrants to the Far West. But fear and extreme misery had well-nigh dissapeared; the Poor-house was no longer choked with a multitude, and even in the distressed districts you hear less of starvation'.

This was a time when many of the great estates were sold in the Encumbered Estates Court, including part of the estate at Mount Pleasant, during the course of which through error or slight of hand, some three tenant families were dispossessed under an order of the court for a demand that O'Connor Morris said it had no right to enforce and which was for a debt due to himself and his mother but claimed by the purchaser of that portion of his estate. He goes on to recount that the agent for the purchaser was shot, possibly by one of the injured tenants, but this has never been proven. He is referring here to the shooting of Manifold, close to the entrance to the Pallas Park demesne. The story of Manifold's shooting is recounted in Fr. Shaw's History of Killoughey Parish, where he states that O'Connor Morris' mother had to sell the townland of Ballincanty in order to pay the outstanding debts due on the estate and that the purchaser was the landlord Bernard of Kinnitty Castle. 'The direct result of this deal was the shooting of Bernard's agent, William Manifold, on the 19th October 1852'. Details of the event are set out in Fr. Shaw's History of Killoughey Parish (page 132 of the combined reprinted edition).

O'Connor Morris felt that he came badly out of the incident, although he states that he was not responsible for it and that he was likely to have been reported to the castle as a troublemaker. He goes on to state in his memoir "I was not exactly the person to submit to this kind of thing [intimidation] and I brought an action against one of the three [debtor] tenants in order to prove our title to the arrears and a case came before Baron Pigot who expressed himself in favour of O'Connor Morris. About this time he wrote a pamphlet on the Encumbered Estates Court under the name Irish Magistrate, which he believed attracted some notice at the time. It was also at this time that he began to write short articles for the Press, while at the same time studying law. He was a pupil or apprentice to Mr. Hamilton Smyth, Q.C., whom he described as an excellent and accomplished man, who had written on the law of landlord and tenant and had liberal views on the subject possibly influenced O'Connor Morris to write for The Times on the Irish land question and publish a book on the 1870 Land Act. He entered Lincoln's Inn in 1852 and was called to the Bar in the Hilary Term of 1854, where he practised for nearly twenty years.

In his view, the influence of the legal profession in Ireland declined after the Union and that political life too, in Ireland, languished. Catholic emancipation came in 1829; it was a measure that was too long delayed. O'Connor Morris joined the Irish Home Circuit soon after his call to the Bar. This Circuit which was established by Lord Clare in the closing years of the 18th century comprised the six counties adjoining Dublin and met at Trim, Mullingar, Tullamore, Maryborough (Portlaoise), Carlow and alternately Athy in Naas. Today the Circuit extends from Portlaoise to Sligo and includes the counties of Laois, Offaly, Roscommon, Westmeath and Sligo. After eight years at the Bar, O'Cormor Morris was elected one of the professors at the King's Inns at Henrietta Street, Dublin. Soon after, in 1863, he was appointed the legal member of a commission charged to investigate the rights of owners of fixed nets for salmon in Ireland. He was associated with this tribunal for about six months, examining the rights on the Barrow, Nore, Suir and the Shannon, these being the chief salmon rivers of the south of Ireland. After differences of opinion with his fellow commissioners he ultimately resigned from the commission at the behest of the then Chief Secretary.

As for the life of a country gentleman at that time, he was a member of the Kildare Street club for about 28 years. This club is now no-more. Its only connection with Tullamore is perhaps that it was designed by a Tullamore-born architect. It was noted at the time that the upper-classes of Dublin were for the most part Protestant and that the best life of the city was largely Protestant. It was at this time that the great cathedrals of Christ Church and St. Patrick's were restored at enormous cost, and he felt that on the whole the Establishment, even in those days, was an institution in decline and that ultimately Disestablishment, while not carried out in Irish interest and not a wise or statesman-like measure. It was, nevertheless, an act of justice.

Of his home life at Gortnamona, he states that he bought back part of the estate that had been sold and that he proceeded carefully to examine the state of the property under then prevailing conditions. His grandfather's rents had been fixed during the Great War with France (ending in 1815) and his father had received a large portion of his rents in the labour of cottars on his demesne and that in fact the full rental had not been paid on an average of upwards of twenty years. Time had changed things and he was now in a position to strike off all outstanding arrears and accept a surrender of existing leases with a reduced rental of 25%. He was to write 'my rental had stood the ordeal of Mr. Gladstone's Land Act. It has been scarcely at all reduced, indeed several of the rents have been raised'.

O'Connor Morris married in 1858, to a Miss Lindsay. Of the children of his marriage, his only son followed his father to the Bar. After his marriage he left Gortnamona and settled at Blackrock, on the outskirts of Dublin. Writing as he was in 1895, his comments on the Fenian outbreak of 1866-7 are farseeing. He wrote that it was an early symptom of future troubles which ultimately were to become severe and dangerous. At this time he also got to know the editor of The Times, Mr. Delane, and in 1869 he was asked to write on the Irish Land Question, which had been attracting attention at that time owing partially to the revival of agrarian crime. I wrote in earlier articles of his account of the Midlands from a book published in 1870, arising from his excursions throughout Ireland in 1869. Of agriculture in 1869 he was able to state that 'the methods of agriculture had greatly improved. In some counties, fields had been enlarged wholesale and had become areas where for a better kind of husbandry; farm machinery had been generally introduced; a rotation of crops and turnip culture had replaced the potato plot over thousands of acres'. The condition of 'the humblest tillers of the soil' had advanced, wages had doubled in some places and the enormous number of poor abodes of famine times had disappeared 'in a word, the reduction of the population after 1846-47, the extension of the railway system in Ireland, the opening of new markets and means of transit and the progress of agriculture in its various branches, had had marked beneficent effects, and the southern Irish provinces and their population were much better off than thirty years before'.

Of his book on the Irish Land Question published as articles in the London Times in 1869 and as a book in 1870, O'Connor Morris felt it was largely read and studied and was praised by Lord Russell, Lord Coleridge and was alluded to by Mr. Gladstone. O'Connor Morris believed that the celebrated Land Act in 1870, the first of Mr. Gladstone's Acts, "embodied to a considerable extent the ideas I had expressed on the subject - ideas, it is only proper to say, entertained by many thinking minds".

O'Connor Morris later co-operated with Froude, the historian, in the collection of materials for his book on The English in Ireland in the 18th Century. This is a study which is not well thought of nowadays and has not held its value in the same way as Lecky's History. O'Connor Morris himself felt annoyed when Froude published his work because it treated the Irish as an essentially inferior race and the English as their natural masters. O'Connor Morris wrote to Froude at the time, complaining of the work. However, he notes in his memoirs (writing in 1894) that 'the agitation of the last fifteen years has shown that the Celtic Irish are still a race easily led astray by unscrupulous men; that Catholic Ireland can still be drawn to a great extent into rebellion; that while justice should be done in all respects to Ireland, she requires the firm hand of an able ruler."

In the summer of 1872, O'Connor Morris was appointed a County Court Judge for Louth. This was possibly due to the influence of Lord O'Hagan, the first Catholic Chancellor of Ireland, and also of Delane of The Times. He was transferred from Louth to Kerry in 1878.

Judge in Kerry

He was in Kerry during the Land War of 1879 and the early 1 880s and regretted the passing of the Land Act of 1881, which he saw as reducing the status of the landlord almost wholly, to that of a mere possessor of a rent arranged by a tribunal of the State (the newly formed Land Commission). He noted that "the various causes which at this period gave the Land League power over the Irish peasantry a peculiar efficacy and force in Kerry". He went on to say "the litigation in my court in Kerry was immense, and illustrated the turn of the minds of the people, ingenious, quarrelsome, delighting in law and with little scruple or regard to truth, the characters of the Celt in its least pleasing aspect". In those days O'Connor Morris lived in Dublin and would have spent only the sessions period in Kerry. He also again visited England and sent his own and only son to Clifton College. After an absence of up to twenty years, he returned to Gartnamona (sic) in the summer of 1880. He describes the scene:

Gortnamona in 1880

The place had been let to a tenant who had failed, and I had the troubles of both dilapidations and waste that usually occur in cases like these. I continued to manage my own estate, and had visited it in each year during the period I was unable to reside, and I had a general knowledge of its state and prospects. But the "master's eye" in its daily scrutiny required a more complete insight; and I was much struck by what I saw and felt around me. The bad agriculture of my early youth had disappeared; the potato had been largely replaced by the turnip; the fields were under a rotation of good crops; the cottar dwellings were nearly things of the past; the herds, and flocks, and other animals had been transformed; almost every farm had been enlarged; machinery had been generally introduced; the landscape was seldom puckered up by unsightly fences. If the houses of the farmers too, were not what they ought to have been, the comfort of this class, and of the dependent labourers, had increased in an extraordinary degree; rags and signs of wretchedness were scarcely to be found; the appearance of the men and women had greatly improved; and the servility of old days in their bearing and manner had happily in some measure vanished. The moral aspect of things, however, was less pleasing; I noticed signs of the alienation of class growing up everywhere for a long time; the Land League agitation had made progress; and the peasantry were not what they had been to our family. My wife and I had more than an enthusiastic welcome when we were "drawn home" on the day of our marriage; my mother's funeral was attended by a great mourning crowd when she was laid amidst the ruins of the abbey built by her ancestors. But our return to Gartnamona was not greeted by anything resembling a joyous acclaim; a rift in the lute had already been made; the people treated us with respect but their hearts were cold".

He wrote of the Land League spreading throughout the King's County in 1880 as elsewhere. A plantation of his own was burned but this may have been an accident. Of the movement in Offaly or King's County, he saw this as a protest against the imprisonment of Parnell rather than a social right. He said he was not troubled himself and while the castle (the government) sent a party of soldiers to guard an official that they heard was threatened, O'Connor Morris had made no use of such an escort. He had given a reduction in rents during the depression of 1879 and offered a somewhat larger abatement after a few months had passed. He did not remove a single occupier from his home and says himself that he simply took possession of land for a time in order to make defaulters feel they could not put a crop in it. In his view, King's County was never a rack-rented county and rents were not largely cut down except in comparatively few cases. As for himself, he had his estate revalued and knowing that some of his rents were too low, he applied to the courts for an increase on these, and in almost every instance, they were raised. In some cases his rents were lowered but not to any marked extent. Writing of a nearby estate, (possibly Geashiul and that of Lord Digby) he stated that he kept rather a full record of what had been done by way of improvements and in the case of a great landlord - a neighbour of my own, this record was so complete and exact, that his tenants were althogether baffled. The worse signs of disorder had largely disappeared by 1884/5 but the organisation of the League still remained.

At about the time of the defeat of Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill and the return to power of Lord Salisbury's administration in 1886, O'Connor Morris removed himself from Kerry, an office he had held for eight years with a heavy workload. He was appointed a judge of Roscommon and Sligo, the counties in which he still presided at the time of the writing of his memoir. Here he found his duties pleasant and because of the fall-off in agrarian violence, he was able, again, to spend time with the gentry on circuit with a clear conscience and used his pen in vacation. He wrote (in 1894), 'I am comparatively unknown to a new race of editors. I farm a few fields of my ancestral domain; have restored plantations and have improved the landscape; and have successfully enclosed my "Thormanby Waste", a bog derelict since the Famine. Since the National League has become quiescent, the traditional goodwill of the people around to the old race of Offaly has revived. I often give them friendly advice. I hope I am thought a just and kind landlord...' I write, study, preside in my Court, and settle disputes between my peasant neighbours. Our time at Gartnamona flows on happily, broken only by passing visits to England'.

He completed his memoir with short essays on the National League, the Union and Irish local government.

His book was reviewed in The King's County Chronicle on 21st March 1895, where as expected in a Unionist newspaper, it received very favourable review. O'Connor Morris died at Gortnamona on 3rd August 1904, when he was in his eightieth year.

He is buried in Killoughey old cemetery beside the early 19th century Protestant church with the attractive steeple. A Church which has to date defied demolition. Over his grave is an attractive Celtic memorial.

His house has not been so fortunate as it was destroyed by the Republican element in the I.R.A. in August 1922. The house, built in 1804, stood in a picturesque setting surrounding by wood on three sides and on the northern side, overlooking Pallas lake. None of the late Judge O'Connor Morris's family, of which there were only two daughters surviving, (His son died c.1914) were in residence for some time and the house was in the charge of the servants. Its destruction followed on the burning of many other houses in the locality.

The posting of National troops at Mullaghcrew, a couple of miles from the house, a few days earlier did not save it from destruction. It was noted in the Press at the time that the members of the irregular forces have repudiated all responsibility for these acts, 'although it is known that a band of irregulars were in the locality up to recently'.

O'Connor Morris' daughter, Miss E. O'Connor Morris, followed him in his literary footsteps and had published, in 1894, a Novel Killeen. I am looking for a copy of this book at present for the O.H.A.S. library, if any reader would have one.

The house itself at Gortnamona was described in The King's County Chronicle in 1888 as having been built in 1804 by the late Morris Nugent O'Connor, maternal grandfather of the Judge.

The writer of the Biographical Sketch in the Dictionary of National Biography judged O'Connor Morris harshly from the point of view of his contribution to the historical stage. It must be said that he stands out as an exception to his class in the 19th century, both as a friend of the Catholic landless peasantry and an intellectual member of the gentry class.

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