Wingsch Real Estate Investments   

Portrait: Charles Boycott, an English land agent in Ireland

Wednesday, 22 March 2023 - 11:00 am (CET/MEZ) Berlin | Author/Destination: Editorial / Redaktion
Category/Kategorie: Portrait Reading Time:  5 minutes

🔊 Listen to this Post Charles Cunningham Boycott was an English land agent whose ostracism by his local community in Ireland gave the English language the term boycott. He had served in the British Army 39th Foot, which brought him to Ireland. After retiring from the army, Boycott worked as a land agent for Lord Erne, a landowner in the Lough Mask area of County Mayo.

In 1880, as part of its campaign for the Three Fs (fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale) and specifically in resistance to proposed evictions on the estate, local activists of the Irish National Land League encouraged Boycott’s employees (including the seasonal workers required to harvest the crops on Lord Erne’s estate) to withdraw their labour, and began a campaign of isolation against Boycott in the local community. This campaign included shops in nearby Ballinrobe refusing to serve him, and the withdrawal of services. Some were threatened with violence to ensure compliance.

Opposition to the campaign against Boycott became a cause célèbre in the British press after he wrote a letter to The Times. Newspapers sent correspondents to the West of Ireland to highlight what they viewed as the victimisation of a servant of a peer of the realm by Irish nationalists. Fifty Orangemen from County Cavan and County Monaghan travelled to Lord Erne’s estate to harvest the crops, while a regiment of the 19th Royal Hussars and more than 1,000 men of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) were deployed to protect the harvesters. The episode was estimated to have cost the British government and others at least £10,000 to harvest about £500 worth of crops.

Boycott left Ireland on 1 December 1880, and in 1886, became land agent for Hugh Adair‘s Flixton estate in Suffolk. He died at the age of 65 on 19 June 1897 in his home in Flixton, after an illness earlier that year.

Read more on Wikipedia Charles Boycott (Smart Traveler App by U.S. Department of State - Weather report by weather.com - Johns Hopkins University & Medicine - Coronavirus Resource Center - Global Passport Power Rank - Democracy Index - GDP according to IMF, UN, and World Bank - Global Competitiveness Report - Corruption Perceptions Index - Press Freedom Index - World Justice Project - Rule of Law Index - UN Human Development Index - Global Peace Index - Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index). Photos by Wikimedia Commons. If you have a suggestion, critique, review or comment to this blog entry, we are looking forward to receive your e-mail at comment@wingsch.net. Please name the headline of the blog post to which your e-mail refers to in the subject line.

---

Recommended posts:

• Portrait: Britain’s longest-reining monarch, great and exemplary European, conciliator, beacon of stability, constancy, integrity, conscientiousness, Britishness, solid as a rock, institution, inspiration and companion of generations of people around the globe: Queen Elizabeth II and the end of an era
• Portrait: The Astor family
• Portrait: Oscar Wilde, Irish poet and playwright
• Portrait: 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare
• Portrait: Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher
• Portrait: Desmond Tutu, South African Anglican cleric, anti-apartheid and human rights activist
• Portrait: James Lewis Kraft, founder of the world’s third largest food company
• Portrait: Saladin, the most famous Kurd in history
• Portrait: Hamilton Disston, industrialist and real-estate developer
• Portrait: Christopher Columbus, Italian navigator and explorer
• Portrait: Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States of America
• Portrait: Carl Graham Fisher, the man who built Miami Beach
• Portrait: Johann Jacob Schweppe
• Portrait: John Locke, the father of Classical Liberalism
• Portrait: Cnut the Great