"Humour the People": Subaltern Collective Agency and Uneven Proletarianization in Castlecomer Colliery, 1826–34

Abstract

"Humour the People":Subaltern Collective Agency and Uneven Proletarianization in Castlecomer Colliery, 1826–34 Terence M. Dunne (bio) Late on the morning of 13 March 1832 Thomas Potts, engineer and overseer, was at work at the Pollough engine in Cloneen in the Castlecomer Colliery in the northeast of County Kilkenny. He observed four men clad in long coats and armed with firearms approach him. Potts fled, but was overtaken at the ditch near an adjacent road, knocked to the ground, and shot dead. There were onlookers, colliery workers, none of whom attempted to intervene.1 The name of the engine, Pollough, was derived from the Irish word for many holes or pits,2 a local place-name that brings us to the heart of the conflict: an effort to transform the area from what might be imprecisely called a peasant- or artisanal-based mining involving a plethora of small, relatively shallow pits controlled by master colliers to a system of deep mining and a workforce of waged laborers directly employed by the proprietor, Charles Harward Butler Clark Southwell Wandesforde.3 [End Page 64] Seven years after the killing of Potts, on 7 August 1839, Edward Delany, also known as Red Ned Delany, was hanged outside Kilkenny gaol after undergoing trial and conviction for his alleged role as one of the four assassins. Unfortunately for Delany, he had seemingly attempted to abscond to North America under an assumed name several years before, but the vessel in which he was traveling had run into nautical trouble near Newfoundland and was forced to return.4 These are the more visible apexes of conflict at the Castlecomer Colliery in the period of the late 1820s and early 1830s.5 At this time the area around Castlecomer, located in northeast County Kilkenny and the southeast of Queen's County, was one of the main centers of the Whitefeet.6 Lieutenant-General Sir Hussey Vivian, then commander of the British Army in Ireland, listed in 1832 the Whitefeet territories of Queen's County and environs as "between Athy and Maryborough [present-day Portlaoise] and away beyond Maryborough toward Portarlington, and also all the line of country bordering on County Kilkenny and around Castlecomer."7 The Whitefeet were one of a long series of peasant movements active in rural Ireland from the 1760s to the mid-nineteenth century.8 These mobilizations are often known under the generic monikers [End Page 65] Whiteboys or Rockites, named after notable movements of their kind. Generally speaking, the movements can be understood in terms of particular periods and places when and where there was a widespread use of a standard repertoire of contention typically consisting of clandestine violent direct action.9 These were periods when everyday forms of peasant resistance were revved up to proportions far beyond the everyday: participants transformed the everyday resistance of the occasional burnt hayrick into extraordinary campaigns of violence.10 This was a similar, though more violent, repertoire of contention to that of such Whiteboy and Rockite contemporaries as the Demoiselles in Ariège in the French Pyrenees, the Luddites in northern England, and the Rebecca rioters in western Wales.11 There is a particular advantage to looking at a canonical Whiteboy movement in the somewhat nonagrarian setting of the Castlecomer Colliery. This is to make a small step toward understanding that elements of the Whiteboy repertoire of contention were operative within proto-industrial situations as well as agrarian ones, and within urban and rural settings.12 Fergus D'Arcy has written in regard to the 1820s and 1830s of "a class war in some cities not dissimilar to what was happening in the countryside," while Emmet O'Connor has commented that "in matters of conflict and solidarity, unions drew on [End Page 66] Whiteboyism."13 Additionally, Whiteboyism frequently involved the defense of the wages and employment conditions of rural workers, and in that respect strike action in Castlecomer was not unusual. Conversely, the "combinations" of skilled workers in urban settings featured a far greater degree of formal organization and a wider tactical repertoire than were typically found in Whiteboy movements. Principally, this paper reveals a case of subaltern collective agency—that is, the capacity...