Michael Davitt

DESCRIPTION: "Oh, the Lords and and the Commons, Bill Gladstone and Bright" passed Coercion "and arrests and evictions are going on still." Davitt, Dillon, Parnell, "Kettle and Brennan, and two hundred more" are arrested. "[T]he land it is ours and we mean to be free"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1881 (Zimmerman-SongsOfIrishRebellion)
KEYWORDS: prison farming Ireland political
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Zimmerman-SongsOfIrishRebellion 80, "A New Song on Michael Davitt" (1 text, 1 tune)
Roud #29516
BROADSIDES:
cf. "The Blackbird of Avondale" or "The Arrest of Parnell" (subject)
cf. "The Land League's Advice to the Tenant Farmers of Ireland" (subject)
cf. "Erin's Lament for her Davitt Asthore" (subject of Michael Davitt)
cf. "Garryowen (II)" (tune, per broadside Bodleian Harding B 40(17))
NOTES [846 words]: Bodleian, Harding B 40(17), "A New Song on Michael Davitt ("Then up with the flag, raised by Davitt, our head"), J.F. Nugent and Co.? (Dublin?), 1850-1899 is apparently this ballad but I could not download the image to verify that. It has the tune as "Garryowen."
"A Coercion Act, I should explain, is defined to be a statute which is not a part of the general law, but applies only to some specified portion of the kingdom. And within the limits to which it applies it arms the police with powers unknown to the ordinary law, and sometimes foreign to the spirit of that law." (source: The Lighter Side of My Official Life by Sir Robert Anderson, 1910 on the Casebook site re Jack the Ripper).
In 1881 Gladstone established "the Irish Coercion Act that let the Viceroy detain people for as 'long as was thought necessary.'" (source: "William Ewart Gladstone" in Wikipedia)
Zimmerman-SongsOfIrishRebellion: "A.J Kettle and Thomas Brennan were Land Leagers arrested in 1881.... John Dillon was arrested in May 1881, but was released later on grounds of ill-health."
Zimmermann p.281: "Michael Davitt, who had been sentenced in 1870 to fifteen years' penal servitude for his share in the Fenian movement and released in 1877, was re-arrested in February 1881. Released in 1882, he was again prosecuted for seditious speeches and imprisoned for four months in 1883 ...." - BS
Considering that Gladstone worked for most of his career trying to improve conditions in Ireland, and passed much relief legislation, and on one occasion lost a confidence vote over a proposal for Home Rule, this is a pretty unfair accusation. It was the Tories who opposed rights for Ireland (Lyons, pp. 182-187, especially p. 183). Yes, Gladstone at times was forced to clamp the lid down, but it was hardly something he desired. Unfortunately, he inherited an Ireland which was in turmoil over tenants' rights (see, e.g., "The Bold Tenant Farmer"). He also had to contend with the Phoenix Park Murders (see the notes to "The Phoenix Park Tragedy"). The situation was bad enough that any government would have been forced into a crackdown.
Kettle is, I assume, Andrew J. Kettle, a Land League organizer, whose son Thomas was a nationalist but died at the Somme (Boylan, pp. 185-186).
John Bright (1811-1889) is a more confusing case: He was a pacifist, but an imperialist, and supported more freedom for Ireland and India, but opposed Home Rule in 1886.
Michael Davitt (1846-1906), having seen his family evicted from their land at five and then lost his arm in an industrial accident at the age of 11 or 12 (Boylan, p. 84; Kee, p. 74), started out as a radical, and though he moderated over the years, he was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment in 1870. Released after half that time, he allied with Charles Stewart Parnell to form the Land League, though they would later fall out violently. He was imprisoned again from 1881-1882, this time apparently for more conservative views. (Altogether he is a very confusing figure, at least to me.) In 1886, he supported home rule (Kee, p. 119).
His popularity is a bit ironic, given that he was anti-clerical and inclined toward socialist solutions. As Boylan says on p 85, "Ironically, 'the land for the people' meant to Davitt the nationalisation of the land, whereas to the tenants it could mean only one thing, ownership by themselves.'"
Moody/Martin/Keogh/Kiely, p. 248, describe Davitt this way, "Davitt was the son of an evicted small tenant, exiled in 1850 from Mayo to Lancashire... in the cotton town of Haslingden. At the age of nine he was working twelve hours a day in a cotton mill. He was just over eleven when in 1857 he lost his right arm in a machine he was minding. This led to four years of unexpected schooling and employment with the local postmaster. A life of comparative security seemed to be opening up when in 1865 Davitt threw himself into the Fenian movement. His Fenian activities earned him in 1870 a sentence of fifteen years' penal servitude, of which he served seven years, mainly in Dartmoor Prison. His release on ticket-of-leave in December 1877 was the outcome of a long and persistent agitation of amnesty for the Fenian prisoners, in which Butt, Parnell, and others took a leading part. He emerged from prison a far more formidable enemy than he went in. He was still a Fenian but critical of Fenian methods and dogmatism.... A Catholic who had been taught by a Wesleyan schoolmaster, he accepted religious diversity as a social fact and not a ground of estrangement...."
For more on Davitt, see the notes to "The Bold Tenant Farmer"; he is also the subject of "Erin's Lament for her Davitt Asthore."
John Dillon (1851-1927) came from a wealthy background but spent most of his life campaigning for land reform; he was four times imprisoned despite spending most of the years 1880-1918 in parliament (OxfordCompanion, p. 148).
For Parnell (1846-1891), see the various songs in the cross-references.
The other imprisoned Land Leaguer, Brennan, was not noteworthy enough to show up in the histories I checked. - RBW
BibliographyLast updated in version 5.2
File: Zimm080

Go to the Ballad Search form
Go to the Ballad Index Song List

Go to the Ballad Index Instructions
Go to the Ballad Index Bibliography or Discography

The Ballad Index Copyright 2024 by Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle.