 around the north-west. Now there was a landlord, a big landlord here in the Donegal back in the 1800s who was a fascinating character, in fact described as a flamboyant and complex character. Lord George Augusta Hill and he owned 23,000 acres of Ghidor but set about trying to improve the situation for his tenants. Didn't quite go to plan but a new book has been written now about that time and about his time as a landlord here. It's called The Peer, The Priests and The Press, a story of the demise of Irish landlordism. It's written by Roy Greenslades who was a Fleet Street editor and for 28 years worked as a media commentator for The Guardian, as the media commentator I should say for The Guardian. And he's a former professor of journalism at City University in London. This is his fourth book. He divides his time between Remelton and England in Brighton to be precise and two very civilised towns but Remelton is far the better Christmas lights display. Roy, good afternoon. Happy New Year to you. John, glad to be here. Thank you for having me. It's unusual to be chatting about a book in January. Yes, it was sort of rushed out for the Christmas market I think but of course I don't know whether too many people are worried about that. I'm very pleased to say that I've signed some books that people gave away as Christmas presents. If everyone's thinking of a New Year present, I can't think of a better book for them to buy. Well, let's go through the story of the subject Lord George Hill, politician and landowner and before that soldier. Yes, I mean he was born to a titled family, the Marquis of Downshire who owned, as you know, Hillsborough Castle, which is now owned really by the King of England. I nearly said Queen, you know, we can't forget that. We can't forget that business. Anyway, they owned a huge acreage of County Down and a great dealer in other counties too. But he was the fifth son. Now in those days, the fifth son gets very little. And so he had to make his way in the world. There were three choices. He could go into the priesthood. He could become a priest. He could have gone into the army. He could have gone into the civil service. He chose the army, became a guards officer and spent most of his time as a young man as a much sought after dance partner at various high society aristocratic events. Funnily enough, many of them in Brighton because the then Prince Regent was set up in Brighton at Brighton Pavilion and Lord George is a strange kind of thing. Lord George spent a lot of time staying in Brighton, going to the Pavilion and when they took their carriage rides, they used to ride along the seafront and they would turn their carriage round at the very terrace where we live in Brighton. That's a strange circumstance. And here I am living in the house in Remelson where Lord George lived and at one time he would have been near the house we live in in Brighton. It's a strange coincidence. Is it a coincidence or do those two things explain your interest in them? Yeah, no, that's exactly what happened. When we bought the house in 1989, his name was on the deeds and it shows how fast I worked John in that it's taken me 30 odd years to write the book. But in fact, I always meant what was it about this man? Plenty of people said he was an evil landlord. Others said he was unusually kindly. But I couldn't get a handle on him at all. I needed to do research and my work at the Guardian so on kept me away. But once I was freed from the Guardian, freed from my university post, I set out to research him. And this man on the deeds suddenly came alive to us. We did know that he married Jane Austen's niece. In fact, he married two nieces because she died and then he married her sister. Her sister who came over from mainland to look after. That's right. She came to look after the four children that he had with his first wife. And I suppose love in those circumstances blossomed. And very late in her life, he had a child with her as well. But those two, that's an odd kind of quirk because Jane Austen died in 1817. So neither of these nieces really knew her. But one was in fact, funnily enough, one was, I think, godmother to the baby, the second one. So that's a strange circumstance, had nothing to do with what happened to him. After his army career. He made it all the way to major in the army. Yes, yes. I mean, you just bought it to be honest with you. In those days, you just bought your title. And then he sold it. He sold it. Is that right? Is that how he made that money? No, no, he inherited the money from his mother. Selling the commission was a relatively small matter. Everyone did it. The important thing was that when he was a guards officer, he was obviously doing nothing. I mean, we'd won the war against Napoleon long before we weren't fighting. We weren't fighting anywhere else. And he joined the army with nothing to do. A cousin. They all were well connected, of course, all interrelated. A cousin suggested he became a decomp at Dublin Castle to the then viceroy. So he comes to Dublin Castle. Obviously, he knows Ireland from the fact that his brother was now the third Marquis of Downshire, and he traveled regularly to Hillsborough. But now he thought to himself, I'd like to know more about Ireland. He becomes interested in its antiquities. He becomes interested in its culture slightly. We think he already showed an interest in its language. He spoke Irish, didn't he? He did. He learned Irish, yeah, which was a unique situation for someone of his class and background. That was unique. So he then decides one day he meets a man, an interesting Englishman called James Don Brain. Don Brain's interesting for all sorts of reasons. Firstly, he founded the Coast Guard of Ireland. Secondly, he was the one who discovered Don Louis, Donegal. He built the house that we now that still sits there on the Poison Glen. People can see it from the road. It's the big pink house, or orange if you're colour blind, across the lake there. Don Brain built that. And at some stage, he takes Lord George, 1834-ish, takes him to Donegal, and what we have to believe, because Lord George didn't write very much down, but what we have to believe from Booklet that Don Brain wrote about Lord George, we have to believe that he fell in love with two things. One, the scenery, which and the idea that perhaps this would be a place to attract tourists, hunting, shooting, fishing people. And secondly, that he took pity, we have to believe, on the conditions of the people living in Guidor. Now, this happens in 1834. Lots happens in his life over the next four years. He becomes ADC to the Chief of the Army in Ireland, Lord Bing. He stands for Parliament and is an MP for a while in Carrick Fergus. But what we think is that on his mind all the time was, when my mother dies, I come into money. Now, he came into 25,500 pounds, which doesn't sound much today, but was much more than a million then. Now, he could have done all sorts of interesting things, but this we're in the heart now of the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. He could have invested in the burgeoning manufacturing industries later in railways. He could have simply put it in the bank and lived off it forever. But he spends an enormous amount buying four estates in Guidor, which took up half his money. He then spent a huge sum building the harbour, which we now know as Bunberg Harbour, building the church there, St Patrick's Protestant Church. He built the hotel that we now call Uncurt, that he originated. He built roads. He built bridges. A grain store. A big grain store. Big grain store, which is a story behind that in itself. And he wanted control of the grain, but he did. He did. He wanted, I mean, you've got to think all the time that he was both an authoritarian, he would have it his way, and a paternalist. In a way, you can't, you know, he wants to do well, but he wants to do it on his terms. And I think there's an author who wrote about Jane Austen's nieces called Sophia Hillen, who said that good was to be done to the people whether they wanted it or not. And that's a really very good quote, because what he decided was these people, and this phrase crops up, it's there on the church, in a plaque on the church, he set out to civilise the barbarians of Guidor, as he saw them, the savages. He saw the people of Guidor and many of them, his tenants as being backward and having very old fashioned working methods, especially farming methods. And that was one of the things he said about changing as well. You could say the things that he introduced, you know, the building of the harbour and the grain store and roads, that it all served his purposes, but it also helped the people of the area as well. So it did. You've got to see the shades, the nuances in what he did. Yes, the Taba was useful to him, but not that massively useful. It was much more that he did see that if he exported the grain that his tenants were growing, then he could make money. But not, we're not talking about massive profits here. And he could, most importantly, import grain at times when, and we'll come on to the famine in a second, but the truth is he saw the agricultural system, which we know as Rondale, he saw that as a backward, chaotic, anarchic way of life. Just to explain Rondale, it's basically subdivision of plots. It is. People would have a plot and then as they had children and so on, they would subdivide it endlessly. It kind of worked. More people had a bit of land, but his belief was that it wasn't enough land to sustain them. He thought that it wasn't profitable to do it and productive to do it the way they did it. Their life was not about making profit. Their life was about subsistence living and survival, but they lived, by the way, even he conceded, they lived happy lives. In their poverty, they sang a lot. They were brave. They took to the sea in very small boats to catch fish and they eaked out a living on bad land. Lots of sandy soil, very little soil, in fact, if you look at the land around Guido. The rock is there. There's not much on top of it. He thought I can improve these people's moral and social lives by reorganizing the way, not only the way that they run their agriculture, but even the way they live. They collected their homes together in what were called clackens. He thought, no, they spend too much time enjoying themselves in their clackens. Let's move their houses apart and by moving them apart, they won't spend so much time at night doing two things he disapproved of. One, staying up late and two, distilling alcohol. He and Don Brain together were really temperance men who disliked the idea and lots of these people. That was their pleasure. Not only their pleasure in they made money from it, but also their pleasure in a place where pleasures were very few, were back to the grin and what was to be done with it. Indeed. So he thinks they should be exporting their grain and making money from it. They say, we want that grain to distill alcohol. And there was a clash early on. It was amazing when you think about it, when you think that he was changing their agricultural method, building houses that separated them into their clackens, stopping them from distilling alcohol, amazing that he got away with it. In a sense, it shows that he did have charm. They were charmed, they were amazed that he spoke Irish. They were also amazed when in every year he invited them in to eat with them. They couldn't believe that he would do that. So he did have about him a way of getting on with people. I think if I read into his character, he was kind of a soft chap, slight of build, not expressive, not flamboyant. You said flamboyant at the beginning. I don't think he really was very flamboyant. He was a modest man, I think. But I mean, and soon after he buys this in 1838, it's not long before and go to more before the famine. And all the evidence points to the fact that he performed brilliantly during the famine. No one died on his estates in the famine. 30,000 people died in Donegal. I remember seeing a speech by the president in Milford a few months ago in which he cited that figure, but no one directly died from the famine at Lord George's estates. That in itself is remarkable. That's remarkable. He imported grain and with Don Brain, they defied Trevalion in Dublin by giving away some for free, which absolutely appalled the British authorities. So up to the point of the famine and through the famine, including Black 47, on into the early and to the beginning of the 50s, it's fair to say that the tenants met him halfway. They were pleased broadly at the treatment. Although if you read, if you read between the lines, there was tension, but not expressed in a way which was negative towards him. And what changed? What changed was lots of landlords, including Lord George, in the post famine era, were strapped for cash in a big way. I ought to mention that, you know, he'd spent a lot of money, by the way, refurbishing the house I now live in in Remoulton in Balear. He spent a lot of money on that. He spent a lot of money through the famine. He wasn't making a profit. And there were plenty of landlords around. You will have heard of John George Adair, a victor of the people of Derivé. You will have heard for sure of the third Lord Litrim, a victor of many people in Milford and Carragart. Both, by the way, friends of his, even though if he disapproved of them, he remained friendly with them. He, like them, is trying to find a way to make money, to be profitable. And so he does the thing which finally outrageous his tenants. He imports sheep from Scotland. He imports shepherds from England and Scotland and takes away the historic grazing land of his tenants. Why did he need to import shepherds from Scotland? Was another tradition in Ghidor already at that stage of sheep farming or was he introducing sheep farming in the area? I think he was introducing sheep farming. Most importantly, he was introducing a specific kind of sheep. And secondly, it was also about control. The tenants like to rule themselves as best they could. Here, through the shepherds, he would have a definite control of what they did and could be guaranteed profit from their sheep dealing. This was, we now call it the sheep war. The word war may be overdoing it a bit, but the tenants, and they weren't alone in Ghidor, in the other districts, Falkara, further down in Dunleary, they were... Dunleary. As I said, it is a lot further down. A lot further down. Dunleary. They were, they rebelled. They began to, how can we hit back against these incomers? Many of the Scots were Protestant. They didn't like that. They didn't get on, they didn't try and mix with the local people. So what they did was they started what we might call sheep rustling. They killed the sheep. They maimed sheep. They stole sheep. They kidnapped and hid sheep. And there were, and this brought them into conflict at last with Lord George. And we have to see that this was widespread. It was, and it was really also the case that we now know that the shepherds caught on to the fact that they could guarantee for every sheep that was missing compensation. And they began to do pretty illegal things as well. They would kidnap their own sheep or hide their own sheep or maim their own sheep on the surety that they were going to be compensated. This sheep war meant that Lord George and his fellow landlords decided to bring in extra police from Dublin from the south. And then they set the tax for the extra police on the tenants. So now the tenants are themselves strapped for cash. They've lost their historic grazing land. He begins to raise rents. They're now paying extra tax, the police tax or the sheep tax, as they called it. Now there was a real clash. And so this kindly landlord by 1857 is no longer regarded in the same way. And there is massive tension. And what happens is the tenants find in the local priests, spokespeople, particularly one called John Doherty, spokespeople who carry their case further afield, begin to get some publicity in newspapers, begin to engage with politicians elsewhere. And this is really the key to my book. So that's where the priests and the press come in? That's where the priests come in. And then they discover a single journalist or a journalist discovers them who takes up their case. He is running a newspaper in Belfast. He's a corkman actually, Dennis Holland, running a newspaper in Belfast. And he decides, he hears about this. He's very much on the tenant side. His newspaper is called The Ulsterman, fights the tenants case. And not just Catholic tenants, by the way, but Protestant tenants too. And he travels across from Belfast to Guidor. And now you get, for the first time, eyewitness accounts of what life is like. So although Lord George believes he's improved the lives of his tenants, we still see people living in awful conditions. One set of clothes, no shoes, living in grim quarters, eating, often subsiding on seaweed, and so on. So things hadn't improved since the famine? Not really improved. Not really improved. And it may be we get some exaggeration. I've no doubt there was exaggeration along the way, but the pictures taken in 1880, one of which is on the front of my book, those pictures still show people living in a pretty grim fashion. And that is 30 years on from the period I'm talking about. So with MPs, one or two sympathetic MPs who read what Dennis Holland has to say, who will meet the priests, they decide we need to get a proper parliamentary inquiry into this. So against all the odds, because you have to think it is remarkable that this one area of Guidor, these four estates, this 23,000 acres, these 3,000 tenants, become the focus of a major select committee inquiry in Westminster. And so in 1858, Lord George has to travel to London to answer questions, severe questions in some cases from some of the committee members about whether or not his tenants live in destitution. And that is a tremendous moment in his life. He doesn't like the idea. And he's not alone. Oldfoot's, the, Wyprince Oldfoot's, who owned the area around Falkara, he has to go as well, other landlords do too, to answer questions from committee members about the nature of their tenants. Tenants travel over to, which is a remarkable thing that they went to London, several of them, and gave evidence in front of the MPs. I've read all the evidence. I've read every word of it. And there is no doubt in my mind that they had a case. But it won't surprise you to learn that a British appointed select committee, mainly by the way, composed of landlords, decided that there is no destitution in Donegal, and they find on his behalf. And I think that, okay, so they got away with that. And for the next 20 years of his life, it is much more the kindly landlord and the evil landlord are there together. And it's a much more nuanced, grayer view that we have of Lord George than the one who came in 1842 at first. But it's this utterly fascinating story about how a group of tenants, one major priest, nine priests in all, but John Doherty, and one journalist, Dennis Holland, managed to bring this to the attention of the British authorities. It's terrific, really. Okay, and it makes a great read as well. Just to finish out the story, I suppose, he lived to be what age? He lived to be 78, which would have been a big age back then. It was. I mean, he died at the house I live in in Balear. He died there in 1879. Was buried in Cornwall? He's buried in Cornwall with one wife. I see some newspapers have suggested both wives. But in fact, his second wife is buried just above us in Tully Graveyard in in Remelton. And he's buried there next to his first wife in Cornwall. And his church continues in in Bunbeg, although I don't think they have many services there. But I've been to a service there recently. And I suppose and and his other legacy was his son, his eldest son, Arthur, had none of his father's tact or charm. And he also came into it in a period of great attention. We now have a land league being formed. We have wider rebellion against the whole concept of landlordism. And this unsympathetic son starts evicting people. Arthur, Arthur Hill, not a not a nice guy inspector of prisons. And I'm glad to say that and one of the nice things he died poor in England. So he got his comeuppance, and he had to let the he had to let those estates go without compensation. So in a way, as I say, right at the end of the book, the tenants evicted him. Okay, brilliantly. It's all in the book. The book is called The Peer, The Priests and the Press, a story of the demise of Irish landlordism at Roy Greenslade. It's been an absolute pleasure and the best look of the book. Thank you. Thank you.