Another of the real-life "bachelors" of Albany Chambers, the exclusive London address we were discussing here last week, was a man who changed the course of Irish history, although not in a way he intended.
Hubert George de Burgh-Canning (1832–1916), aka the Earl of Clanrickarde, was the classic absentee landlord, who in 1874 inherited 57,000 acres of East Galway but never set foot on them during the years when his determination to continue extracting income from the property earned him the nickname “Lord Clanrackrent”.
He was a sporadic attender of the House of Lords, taking his seat on only six occasions, twice to vote against Home Rule
He was the prime cause, in 1886, of the “Plan of Campaign”: a successor to the Land War under which reduced rents were offered to selected landlords and, if refused, diverted into a fund the payees could access only if they agreed to the reductions.
Clanrickarde resisted this and all other reforms, evicting large numbers of tenants on principle, with no regard for the increasingly violent consequences visited on his own agents. After three bailiffs had been shot, a fourth wrote to him to say that he too had been fired at, to which the landlord responded: “Tell the scoundrels that any attempt to shoot you will not intimidate me.”
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If not an absentee there as well, he was a sporadic attender of the House of Lords, taking his seat on only six occasions: twice to vote against Home Rule and the other four times to oppose Land Bills.
His implacability to change was counter-productive, however. He eventually became an embarrassment to government and the catalyst for further legislation of the kind he hated.
An Act of 1907 was largely the result of his evicting a rent-compliant tenant in Loughrea for political reasons, while the compulsory purchasing powers later given to Congested Districts Board were mainly aimed at forcing him to sell his Galway estate, which he did finally for £238,211.
I mentioned last week that The Albany's fictional residents of the 1890s included Jack (aka "Ernest") Worthing from The Importance of Being Earnest. That was not the only time Oscar Wilde used the address. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the complex is also home to an uncle of Lord Henry, the arrogant aristocrat who inspires the main character's descent into moral bankruptcy.
Via the uncle – an ex-diplomat titled Lord Fermor – Wilde presents a comically exaggerated portrait of the kind of person who lived in the apartments then.
Having succeeded to his father’s title and fortune, we are told, Fermor had “set himself to the serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing”.
Day after day he could be seen sitting on the terraces of the London zoo eating a frugal lunch out of paper
The novel continues: “He had two large town houses, but preferred to live in chambers because it was less trouble, and took most of his meals at his club. He paid some attention to the management of his collieries in the Midland counties, excusing himself for this taint of industry on the ground that the one advantage of having coal was that it enabled a gentleman to afford the decency of burning wood in his own hearth. In politics he was a Tory, except when the Tories were in office, during which period he roundly abused them for being a pack of Radicals.”
There are echoes of Dorian Gray in the real-life Clanricarde – also a former diplomat – except that he himself was the decaying portrait in the attic. Apart from its accumulation, and an art collection which filled his rooms, he does not appear to have derived much enjoyment from money. He was a miser who dressed shabbily, ate little, and had few friends.
“Although surrounded by priceless art treasures, he never entertained nor dined out,” says one account. “Day after day he could be seen sitting on the terraces of the London zoo eating a frugal lunch out of paper. He never brushed his frock coat lest the friction would wear it out.”
In the meantime, the fierce determination with which he fought even moderate attempts at Irish land reform helped ensure the campaign’s ultimate success, albeit at a cost of much misery to the evicted and to some of those who had to carry out his orders.
While the landlord grew old and ever wealthier in London, the Clanrickarde estate was, in the words of British Chief Secretary Augustine Birrell, "haunted by the ghosts of murdered men".
In a rich irony, De Burgh-Canning was himself evicted from the Albany eventually, also over a rent dispute, although not to the side of the road.
He died instead, aged 84, “at his rooms in Hanover Square”.
He had never married and had no direct heirs, so most of his titles went with him.
And even the timing of his death now seems damning. It was early April, 1916.