Captain Boycott 1832-1897
The Captain Boycott story has all the elements of a Hollywood movie, which in fact it was in 1947. Charles Boycott (1832-1897), a cruel land agent for Lord Erne’s estate on the shores of Lough Corrib, exacted extortionate rents and evicted tenants who couldn’t pay, until his tyranny was heroically defeated through the passive resistance of his tenants.
They were sparked by a speech in 1880 given by the prominent political agitator, Charles Stuart Parnell (president of the Irish Land League, which advocated for tenants' rights), urging tenants to isolate unreasonably landlords, rack-renters and land-grabbers rather than resorting to violence.
Captain Boycott’s tenants and labourers began to shun him when he refused to reduce rents following a bad harvest. His workers left, his labourers stopped harvesting, his grooms and stables boys abandoned the horses and his domestic staff abandoned the house. Local tradesmen in Ballinrobe refused to recognise his existence. No farrier would shoe his horse, no shop keeper would sell him food, even the post boy refused to deliver letters.
He wrote to The Times of London ".....people collect in crowds upon my farm and order off all my workmen. The shopkeepers have been warned to stop all supplies to my house. My farm is public property, I can get no workmen to do anything, and my ruin is openly avowed as the object of the Land League unless I throw up everything and leave the country"
Eventually, he was forced to hire in Orangemen from Ulster to work the farm and English soldiers to protect them. However, the soldiers were treated so poorly that they turned their sympathies towards the locals, and eventually Captain Boycott was forced to return to England defeated.
The Times of London in Nov 1880 coined the term "boycott" as a word meaning to ostracize in reference to his plight. While the practise was an ancient one, the publicity his case garnered went on later to inspire Gandhi and Nehru in their peaceful struggle for Indian independence.
When Captain Boycott fled, the lease of his home Lough Mask House on the shores of Lough Mask was taken over by the Daly family in the mid-1880s who still live there today.