I

John Morrogh was born in Cork city’s historic Shandon district, a bustling commercial area of small retailers and also of dense population and concentrated poverty.Footnote ⁷ His father, Dominic (b.1816), was a cabinetmaker, an artisanal profession that, overtaken by England’s industrial production, was fast dying out. Dominic does not figure as a permanent worker in the city’s trade directories and was likely among the artisans only seasonally employed and not unfamiliar with financial hardship.Footnote ⁸ Morrogh, born shortly after the worst years of the famine, must have grown up hearing talk of desolation across swathes of Ireland: Conor Cruise O’Brien claimed that the famine ‘was present either in the memory or in the imagination of every Irishman’.Footnote ⁹ He would have absorbed a simple narrative of a great hunger wrought upon the Irish by English tyranny that, while not always accurate in its details and silent about Irish complicities, captured a moral outrage for a catastrophe that could have been averted.Footnote ¹⁰ In Cork, this narrative was widespread: all classes, rich and poor, laid their troubles at the door of British misrule, a bedrock belief that in Morrogh’s case, was bolstered by his attendance at the Christian Brothers’ North Monastery School.Footnote ¹¹ The teaching order, founded for the education of poor Irish boys, aimed to instill a Catholic education stressing Irish history and long conflict between the Irish and English: in 1868, Judge William Brooke claimed that the Brothers taught ‘narratives of English perfidy and cruelty … of such a character that the Irish student can hardly fail to be imbued with a detestation of any connection with England’.Footnote ¹² Cork city was proud of its Brothers’ schools, and particularly of the ‘North Mon’. When by the late 1860s Morrogh had shown himself to be so outstanding a student that the Brothers engaged him as an instructor, he must have felt his future was set, for he soon proposed to his sweetheart, Kate Griffin, a Shandon neighbour. Her father was a cattle dealer and rejected him as too poor, whereupon Morrogh decided to leave Ireland. For twenty guineas, he could purchase in Southampton or London a second-class passage on a steam packet bound for the Cape.Footnote ¹³ That he chose South Africa may have been a result of reports of spectacular diamond finds coupled with the humiliation of being dismissed as a young man bereft of prospects.Footnote ¹⁴ To this educated yet lower-class Catholic Irishman, thwarted in love and thwarted more generally by the constraints of Irish life, the expanding British Empire offered adventure, opportunity and the chance to prove his mettle.

By the time Morrogh arrived in the Diamond Fields sometime between 1869 and the early 1870s, the earliest rush along the Vaal River was shifting to arid farms twenty-five miles away.Footnote ¹⁵ Rapacious diggers overran Boer farms, followed by merchant speculators who bought up the property: Johannes De Beer’s Vooruitzicht farm, the site of what would become the two richest mines, De Beers and Kimberley, was purchased for £6,000.Footnote ¹⁶ The original 470 claims into which the Kimberley mine was divided, each of which could be purchased for a few pounds, were quickly subdivided. Within months, there were close to 2,000 separate properties, with some segments going for over £1,000.Footnote ¹⁷ In the original almost 600 claims in the De Beers mine, there was a similar subdivision, with the price of claims going from £20 to £4,000 over the course of months.Footnote ¹⁸ By the end of 1871, a shifting population of some 20,000 whites and 30,000 Africans was involved in complicated disputes over claim boundaries, contradictory British and Boer laws, and the role of Africans in the fields.Footnote ¹⁹

Morrogh’s arrival in the diamond fields could not have been much different from that of thousands of men with limited funds and feverish hopes of becoming rich.Footnote ²⁰ Like most, he knew nothing about diamond mining, but he must have soon learned the basic steps which must be guessed at from the accounts written by others in the rush to Kimberley since, until he became successful, Morrogh is lost among the thousands. The first priorities were to secure a claim, a home (likely a tent), a partner or two, and basic equipment which, as Cecil Rhodes told a friend, consisted of ‘picks, shovels, and ordinary zinc buckets, and rope for hauling the buckets out of the claims’.Footnote ²¹ If at first Morrogh could not afford or find a claim, he may have started work as an ordinary hand or share worker, and, with a percentage of the profits of a productive holding, he could have saved enough to purchase his own claim.Footnote ²² The work was hard. ‘No more wretched existence can be imagined than that endured by early diggers,’ wrote Morrogh’s contemporary, Dr J. W. Mathews.Footnote ²³ A Times correspondent warned: ‘A man of unsteady habits or not able to ‘rough it’ ought to be the last to come here’.Footnote ²⁴ The small size of the claims — 30 square feet — meant miners dug down. Some diggers worked their claims faster than others, which made the mines dangerously uneven, with collapses and fatal accidents a constant hazard. A determined digger worked from sunrise to sundown amid a lack of water and plagued by fleas, flies, filth and the stench of open latrines and rotting garbage. Added to this was the anxiety about the volatile value of diamonds and fear of bankruptcy for those who had borrowed at usurious rates, the only finance to be had in Kimberley. Many gave up. A Times report noted: ‘A considerable amount of persons [are] … returning miserably disappointed’.Footnote ²⁵ Some stayed, but changed digging for a more secure, if dull, source of income as storekeepers, hotelkeepers, carpenters or blacksmiths. In the mid 1870s, things got worse as diggers reached the bottom of the soft ‘yellow’ earth layer. The ground below (‘blue stuff’) was rich diamondiferous rock whose extraction required expensive steam-powered machinery for drilling and blasting down.Footnote ²⁶ Owners of smallholdings sold up and left. However, ‘[f]or the man with a cool head, steady nerve, some capital or credit, and proper information …, these were the critical months of opportunity’.Footnote ²⁷ Morrogh stayed.

Early diamond rush in Kimberley. Public Domain.

Morrogh was one of the lucky few who acquired holdings in the De Beers mine: as evidenced by the alliances he was able to make later, his claims were either in some of the best ground, or they were in a good strategic position to facilitate — or block — further amalgamation. As a successful digger, Morrogh would have taken on African workers to do the heavy digging, hauling, carting and breaking up the diamondiferous rock.Footnote ²⁸ But the most pressing issue for those who stayed was where to find capital for the next stage of deep mining. London merchant banks did not consider mining a safe investment but, as Cecil Rhodes found when he combined the largest owners in the De Beers mine into the De Beers Mining Company and offered shares, there was local capital to be tapped.Footnote ²⁹ His joint-stock company was such a success it led to a stampede, known as ‘share mania’. Over one year, seventy joint stock companies were set up, with a combined nominal value of £7 million.Footnote ³⁰ Barney Barnato, a man as determined as Rhodes to extend his control over the diamond mines, seized the opportunities afforded by joint-stock companies and floated five companies. Two were in the De Beers mine — Frere Diamond Company and De Beers Central Diamond Company — and John Morrogh was a founding partner in both.Footnote ³¹

John may have met Barnato through the latter’s early work as a kopje walloper when Barnato made the rounds of the mines buying diamonds directly from the sorting tables, the lowest form of diamond buying. Barnato, who boasted he knew ‘every foot of ground’ in the mines, would have registered the fact that Morrogh, by then an experienced miner, which Barnato was not, held rich and well-positioned claims, but only a few, so that he needed partners with capital.Footnote ³² Barnato not only partnered with Morrogh, but he also made him manager of the De Beers Central Diamond Company. Morrogh’s decision to join Barnato vaulted him into the heart of Rhodes’s orbit. In 1883, Barnato’s Kimberley holdings suffered a severe collapse and, in need of cash to get them working again, Barnato had no option but to sell his De Beers holdings to Rhodes, who had long sought to buy. In June 1883, Rhodes paid £76,000 for the twelve claims that made up De Beers Central.Footnote ³³ Of the seven founding partners of the company, Morrogh was the only one who transitioned as director into Rhodes’s De Beers Mining Company.Footnote ³⁴ Rhodes sometimes used the offer of a directorship to entice over recalcitrant owners of claims he wanted. This was the case with Francis Oats, owner of the Victoria Mining Company, the last holdout of the De Beers mine; and it was the case with Barney Barnato who threatened, at the twelfth hour, to stall Rhodes’s acquisition of a diamond mining monopoly. But those men held trump cards, Barnato especially so. Though this was not the case with Morrogh, Rhodes, ever alert to possibilities in men that others missed, wanted Morrogh on his team.Footnote ³⁵

Morrogh and Rhodes, close in age, must have come into contact as early diggers in the Baxter’s Gully area of the De Beers mine, where they both worked claims. Also, they both attended meetings of the De Beers Mining Board on which Morrogh served in 1880 and 1881.Footnote ³⁶ The creation of the mining boards in 1874 was part of the colonial government’s attempt to bring order to the early anarchic style of mining. Being chosen as a member of a mining board was a recognition of expertise.Footnote ³⁷ It was also an influential position where contacts were made and relationships built. Rhodes benefitted from having allies on the mining board to make sure the board’s limited resources were allocated to select De Beers mines and withheld from others, a strategy that pushed smallholders out of business and allowed Rhodes to purchase holdings cheaply.Footnote ³⁸ It is possible that an accident involving pumps to drain the mine clinched the relationship.Footnote ³⁹ Rhodes had for some years attempted to control pumps in the De Beers mine.Footnote ⁴⁰ In 1878, when his control was jeopardised, his rival’s pumps were mysteriously sabotaged. Two years later, reckless blasting in a claim Morrogh managed for Mathew Kennedy — who had recently become his father-in-law — smashed the pumps of a Mr. Ramsbottom that stood ready to initiate draining for ‘the general benefit of all claimholders’.Footnote ⁴¹ Whether Rhodes, already suspected of pumping sabotage, had anything to do with this incident is unknown, but it was shortly after this that Morrogh was voted to the mining board, a board Rhodes watched closely.

Contemporaries suggested that to succeed in the fields, a man needed support from friends or family.Footnote ⁴² Morrogh would have quickly gravitated to the Irish community. Irish immigrants to South Africa made up a smaller percentage of the white population than they did in New Zealand and Australia. There were more Protestant Irish than Catholic and more from urban backgrounds than rural.Footnote ⁴³ This was because of the large numbers of mixed race ‘coloureds’ in the Cape that, since the time of the Dutch, performed the kind of manual and servile work that unskilled Irish performed in the United States and elsewhere; and because there was little assisted migration to the Cape.Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus, not only had the poor and hungry Irish not migrated there, but there were many better-off Protestant Irish — younger sons with few prospects — who had. Still, some stigma about the Irish existed: ‘No Irish’ notices could be seen in the windows of boarding-houses and jokes and stereotypes of wild and brawling Irishmen abound in contemporary accounts.Footnote ⁴⁵ Nevertheless, although Irish Catholics clustered together and remained critics of British rule in Ireland, their sense of Irishness developed differently than if they had remained in Ireland. Being immigrants in Southern Africa brought Irish of different backgrounds and beliefs together. The sectarian divide, notes one observer, ‘was ameliorated by the intimacy of colonial society and by common dangers [African and Afrikaner hostility] far more immediate than the threat of Rome or the Orange menace’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Only in later years, with tensions emerging around home rule and, especially, as a result of the surge of radical nationalism during the Second Boer War, did Irish unity crack, as discussed below.Footnote ⁴⁷ Despite small numbers, both Protestant and Catholic Irish were remarkably successful: they were journalists, doctors, lawyers, judges, politicians and governors.Footnote ⁴⁸ They set up small businesses and stores in South African towns, including Kimberley, some highly profitable, such as Jerry Delaney’s ginger beer plant, Pat Sullivan’s hotel and mineral water works, and Ulsterman Robert Henderson’s drapery business.Footnote ⁴⁹ Whatever luck Morrogh might have had upon arrival, the fact that he stuck to the diamond business and did not leave as soon as he accumulated some wealth — the default of diggers — was because he found a place within a close-knit community. Thus, as well as forging strategic alliances such as those he struck with Rhodes and Barnato, Morrogh had networks of support among his fellow Irish with whom he likely felt the most comfortable: they frequented the same church, and they may have agreed on the perfidious nature of the English or discussed the astonishing rise of a new Irish leader, Charles Stewart Parnell. In the South African Irish community, Morrogh found his earliest mining partners — and his first wife.

Morrogh married Kate Kennedy in October 1878.Footnote ⁵⁰ She was one of eleven children whose father, Mathew, had arrived in the mid 1840s from Clonrush, Galway, a region badly hit by the Famine. In the six years after their marriage, she bore four children — the first dying in infancy — and ran two canteens for miners. In 1884, she caught typhus and died, a two-year-old daughter following days later. In the years after his wife died, Morrogh poured his energies into his work and reshaped his life.

When, the year before his wife died, Morrogh became a director of De Beers, the company was confronting problems of transforming diamond digging into a diamond industry. Rhodes argued that as well as capital investment, what was needed was the creation of a disciplined African labour force. He believed the ‘compound’ system would accomplish this —and reduce the loss of diamonds. The system imprisoned African workers in guarded compounds, which they could not leave, except for work. At the end of their contract, the men were held in detention centres to be purged of swallowed diamonds.Footnote ⁵¹ ‘Treat the natives as a subject people,’ Rhodes held, ‘as long as they continue in a state of barbarism’, an idea he expanded on in his Glen Grey Act speech in 1894, which is seen as providing the model for the later apartheid system.Footnote ⁵² While large mining companies applauded the system, it caused much controversy among merchants (who lost clients) and among sections of the metropolitan press who viewed it as akin to slavery.Footnote ⁵³ It is interesting to consider where Morrogh might have stood on this question. Even as he found success within the British Empire and profited from the exploitation of South African land and its people, he had not forgotten the Irish nationalist cause, and as early as 1880 (he later claimed), he was contributing to the home rule movement in Ireland.Footnote ⁵⁴

In Kimberley, Morrogh found a variety of ethnic groups, identities and languages and a certain amount of casual integration.Footnote ⁵⁵ However, from the start of the diamond rush, white diggers demanded that Africans populate the fields only as workers, and as the so-called Black Flag Rebellion (1875) had shown, they were willing to fight for this.Footnote ⁵⁶ Morrogh was articulate about nationalism but likely blind to racism when it concerned indigenous people, and before his survival instincts took hold as the rebellion turned anarchic and government troops called in, he may well have sympathised with white diggers’ demand that Africans cease to be a source of competition.Footnote ⁵⁷ A decade later, once Morrogh had joined the ranks of mining capitalists and with his Irish nationalism moulded by his imperial experience, there is little reason to think he would have deviated from De Beers’s claim that, as well as a means of lowering production costs, compounds for Africans were a beneficial ‘civilizing’ force.Footnote ⁵⁸ Moreover, given his rise in the fields and success within De Beers, it was very much in his interests to believe this, especially because, in 1886, the very year Rhodes and his directors introduced the compound system, Morrogh was appointed underground manager of De Beers Mining Company, a temporary appointment until Gardner Williams, an American mining expert, arrived a year later.Footnote ⁵⁹ Presumably, Morrogh approved of a system he was directly involved in overseeing.

Morrogh’s sense of racial entitlement can only have been augmented in 1888 when Rhodes succeeded in amalgamating the principal mines in Kimberley, creating a monopoly company — De Beers Consolidated. Its trust deed allowed it ‘to engage in any business enterprise, to annex land in any part of Africa, to govern foreign territories’.Footnote ⁶⁰ From his arrival as a penniless digger, Morrogh must have exulted in the satisfaction of being a director of what Rhodes pronounced ‘the richest, the greatest, and the most powerful Company the world has ever seen’.Footnote ⁶¹ Morrogh was a director of the company until his death.

Morrogh is seated next to Rhodes with crossed legs, third from right. South Africa Magazine, xxxiii (13 Feb. 1897), 369. Courtesy of Africana Library, Kimberley.

Two years after his wife died, Morrogh remained a widower. As partner to some of the wealthiest miners in Kimberley, he could have found a new wife locally, particularly among the large Kennedy clan. However, useful as the Kennedys were in getting him started, they were less educated and ambitious than he was.Footnote ⁶² As he became successful, it is likely that, like other miners who had worked their way up ‘through all grades of rascality’, he wished to transform his image from tough digger into respectable gentleman.Footnote ⁶³ When he learned that his first sweetheart, Kate Griffin, was widowed, he made a brief visit to Cork, proposed (according to family accounts, he gave her twenty-four hours to make up her mind), married her, and within weeks returned to Kimberley.Footnote ⁶⁴ His visit, in 1886, at a moment when Ireland appeared poised for real political change, must have stoked a nationalism absorbed long ago in Cork and kept alive in Kimberley through organisations such as the Ancient Order of Foresters with branches in South African towns, including Kimberley.Footnote ⁶⁵ Making donations to the home rule effort from afar no longer sufficed; he wanted to play a part in the momentous changes that were coming for Ireland. By mid 1888, Morrogh and his family were back in Cork.

II

Morrogh and Kate Collins (née Griffin) just married. Family photo collection.

Just shy of forty, Morrogh returned to Cork much changed from the unseasoned young man who had arrived two decades earlier in South Africa. The far-flung possibilities of the British Empire allowed him — poor, Irish and Catholic — to unleash his ambitious energy in a way that would have been impossible in Cork. He had learned to take on the challenges of a mining industry moving from an early simple stage towards complex deep mining and how to manage large numbers of workers. He had learned the business side of diamonds, about finance and global markets. Morrogh was no more educated than many of those who had rushed the mines. But few others had survived the cut-throat business of diamond mining to make it into its upper echelons.Footnote ⁶⁶ In South Africa, his nationalism had been rounded out with a local colonial patriotism stemming from what he, and other Irish immigrants, had contributed to a town that had barely existed when they had arrived; from having been a participant in the building up of one of the influential companies in the empire; from viewing himself as an agent of ‘civilisation’.Footnote ⁶⁷ So, while, on the one hand, his colonial experience had transformed him into an upholder of the empire, he also resented metropolitan interference in colonial issues, just as he had always resented England’s interference in Ireland. He had become an imperialist, but from a colonialist perspective.

It is, thus, not surprising that when Morrogh decided to return to Ireland, his plans dovetailed with those of Rhodes. He owed a great deal to Rhodes, and, like many others, he was surely caught by Rhodes’s magnetism and stirred by his ideas of establishing an imperial parliament to govern colonial affairs.Footnote ⁶⁸ Rhodes, already looking to Matabeleland (Zimbabwe) as a first step in his northward African thrust, needed to persuade the British government that he was the man to spearhead that expansion. Well known in the Cape Colony, Rhodes lacked political connections in England and was quite unknown within its upper political circles. It so happened that in 1887, on a trip from England to the Cape, he travelled with Swift MacNeill, fundraiser for the IPP and a close associate of Charles Stewart Parnell. On board, the two men talked a great deal about the Irish question. Rhodes, inspired by the partial self-governing granted through dominion status to Canada, favoured the idea of an imperial federation with parliament made up of British representatives and white colonialist representatives. He thought Ireland with home rule could become an object lesson in such an arrangement. What he did not like about Gladstone’s 1886 Home Rule Bill (which had failed) was that it ended Irish representation in the British parliament. If that could be changed and Irish members retained, he told Swift MacNeill, he was ready to provide £10,000 to Parnell and the IPP.Footnote ⁶⁹ The politically astute Rhodes realised that if members of the IPP viewed his plans as an extension of British imperialism, it could block the realisation of his imperial vision. But, if the party viewed his plans for imperial federation as the means of providing more power to the colonies, its backing could be crucial. To advance this position, Rhodes needed supporters within the IPP.

The following year, when Rhodes was in London, he met with Parnell, after which Rhodes communicated his £10,000 contribution to the IPP by letter. He added that he was authorised to offer a further donation of £1,000 made by a Kimberley resident, John Morrogh.Footnote ⁷⁰ As Rhodes was aware, Parnell, then at the height of his ascendancy, had control over who would be the candidates for the Irish party.Footnote ⁷¹ Morrogh’s contribution, therefore, can be seen as an ‘incentive’ for his consideration as a candidate. He was not Rhodes’s only man in the IPP: in June 1890, Rhodes’s friend and close associate in South Africa, James Rochfort Maguire, became MP for North Donegal.Footnote ⁷² By then, Morrogh had already been elected to parliament. In early June 1889, The Times had reported that:

Towards the end of June, under a cloud of distrust he was never able fully to dissipate, John Morrogh was sworn in as an MP for South-East Cork. When Morrogh was elected MP for South East Cork, he was, as The Times noted, a stranger to his new constituents, to activists in the National Land League and to agrarian radicals in the Plan of Campaign. He was also a stranger to the fractious and talented IPP members close to Parnell, whose politics were forged in the crucible of struggle, nearly all of them personal friends who only later became bitter enemies.Footnote ⁷⁴ Just as Morrogh had started from nothing to become a successful diamond miner, so, too, had the cadre of the IPP set out as political novices to become savvy politicians, adroit at manipulating the protocols of Westminster. These men, returned in 1880 after the introduction of the secret ballot, and in even greater numbers in the 1885 general election, were ‘farmers, small tradesmen, provincial journalists, and the like … few of whom had previously moved much out of their own parishes’.Footnote ⁷⁵ In his later years, their great adversary, Tory prime minister Arthur Balfour, remembered them as a ‘marvelous Parliamentarian phenomenon.’ He saw them rise from ‘small beginnings’ to become ‘a party [outstanding] for the sternness of its discipline and the extraordinary wealth of admirable speakers … some of them great masters of elocution and admirable debaters, formidable in their knowledge of parliamentary methods’.Footnote ⁷⁶

John Morrogh was not a member of this group. He was there in support of Cecil Rhodes’s scheme of imperial federalism and because his money was badly needed to cover election expenses, the evicted tenants’ fund and Parnell’s Indemnity Fund (defense against The Times’s defamation). But, despite Morrogh’s largesse, many believed he had bought himself into a political position he had done nothing to deserve. Fortunes made in Kimberley diamonds were suspect, and Irish nationalists condemned British imperialism, even if IPP members, anxious to woo English Liberals towards home rule, tempered nationalists’ stridency.Footnote ⁷⁷ Morrogh’s record in the House did not change that perception. He kept a low profile and obeyed whips. One reporter noted: ‘He sat four years in the House and never opened his mouth in debate’.Footnote ⁷⁸ From his early days in parliament, Morrogh gravitated towards MPs who had learned their way around the venerable institution. The Healy brothers — Maurice, MP for Cork, and especially Tim, Parnell’s former secretary and a seasoned parliamentarian — may have been instrumental in helping Morrogh navigate Westminster’s intricate proceedings. Certainly, after Captain O’Shea’s divorce hearing and the subsequent Party split, Morrogh, galvanised into action, emerged as a crucial supporter of Tim Healy and the anti-Parnellites. Given the lack of personal papers, it is not clear why he chose this path.

The day after the split in Committee Room Fifteen and signing on as an anti-Parnellite, Morrogh became one of the main donors to a new anti-Parnellite paper, the National Press.Footnote ⁷⁹ The funding allowed Tim Healy, who controlled the paper’s editorial policy, to launch devastating attacks on Parnell and turn around the early pro-Parnell mood in Ireland.Footnote ⁸⁰ Healy’s strategy was to puncture Parnell’s mystique, associating him with Anglo-Irish landowners who had brought suffering to ‘real’ Irish. He accused Parnell of evicting tenants and in a series of vicious articles, titled ‘Stop Thief’, of embezzlement. It was unclear, he said, where the monies of the nationalist movement had gone and claimed that John Morrogh’s cheque for £1,000 had ‘passed into [Mr. Parnell’s] private account and put into his own pocket’.Footnote ⁸¹ Healy’s relentless attacks earned him enemies not only among the Parnellites but also among anti-Parnellites. Many of those who had joined the anti-Parnellites, such as John Dillon, still revered Parnell for his achievements and wished to restore party unity and strict discipline. Tim Healy and members of the ‘Bantry band’, including Morrogh, opposed compromise and pushed for a more decentralised party structure with greater input from local constituencies.Footnote ⁸²

The fiercest struggle came after Parnell’s unexpected death, not between those who stood by Parnell — a dwindling group — and those who broke with him, but between hardline and moderate anti-Parnellites.Footnote ⁸³ The first of their disputes was over the amalgamation of the National Press into the long-established Freeman’s Journal.Footnote ⁸⁴ Dillon favoured the merger for financial reasons and because he saw it as a way to dilute Healy’s control and strengthen that of his ally Thomas Sexton. Healy, forced to admit the financial arguments were sound, tried to bolster his position by nominating Morrogh to the board, which Dillon opposed (Morrogh was against Dillon’s Plan of Campaign).Footnote ⁸⁵ The tense atmosphere among the journalists in the Dublin offices of the newly amalgamated newspaper carried over to Westminster. At one point, a furious Sexton, sensing he might lose his chance to control the paper, announced his retirement from parliament. This caused deep consternation within the IPP and also in Gladstone’s government, which was trying to pass a second home rule bill that was heavily dependent on Sexton’s knowledge of the bill’s minutiae.Footnote ⁸⁶ An urgent meeting among all factions of the IPP agreed to urge Sexton to reconsider. Even Healy and his supporters acknowledged that Sexton was indispensable to the success of the upcoming bill. Thereupon, Sexton retracted a resignation that some suspected had always been a political ploy and gained control of the Freeman’s Journal. For Healy, this was a humiliating defeat, and for Morrogh, a step too far. Within days he had presented his resignation. A Punch cartoon showing him marching off clutching umbrella and travel bag mocked his indignation.Footnote ⁸⁷

Here to-day, gone to-morrow. Punch, Public Domain.

From the start of the acrimonious wrangling among the anti-Parnellites, Morrogh had stood alongside Healy: ‘one of Tim Healy’s most zealous lieutenants’, one source called him.Footnote ⁸⁸ He was with Healy in the dramatic Committee Room Fifteen showdown; he was central in the creation of the group’s new newspaper; and he was on the committee of the National Federation formed to counter Parnell’s National Land League.Footnote ⁸⁹ He was also generous in his donations.Footnote ⁹⁰ Aside from the financial benefits of having Morrogh as an ally, personal affinities must also have worked to bring the two men together. Both had been exceptionally smart young boys born into needy families and educated in the best Christian Brothers schools — Cork and Fermoy — highly regarded for their quality education and staunchly Catholic nationalistic teachings. Both had roamed far from their birthplaces and encountered new worlds that allowed them to remake themselves in remarkable ways, even as they remained attuned to Irish struggles. Healy surely admired Morrogh’s business acumen, and the latter Healy’s brilliance as a parliamentary speaker. Amid the comfortable settings of the National Liberal Club, where they were members, the two men would not only have swapped political gossip and strategies essential to aspiring parliamentarians, but, too, discovered that, long before Parnell’s fall, they had had reservations about the ‘Chief’ with his formidable bearing, grand accent and manifest ascendancy entitlement. For years, Healy had suspected — or known about — Parnell’s affair with Katherine O’Shea, and he was furious when Parnell sidelined him from his group of senior advisors.Footnote ⁹¹ And the sharp-witted Morrogh surely knew that the National Bank, to which, at Parnell’s request (‘Trusting you will keep this letter quite private’), he had made out his cheque, was Parnell’s private bank account and not that of the IPP.Footnote ⁹²

In the National Liberal Club, there were other House members with whom to discuss these issues, particularly the members of the Bantry band, including the wealthiest ones who, with Morrogh, had funded the National Press. John Barry, owner of a linoleum factory in Manchester, was one of the earliest party members to turn against Parnell, while William Martin Murphy, railway constructor and later press baron and instigator of the Dublin Lockout, had been uneasy about Parnell ever since O’Shea’s filing for divorce.Footnote ⁹³ Among these men, Morrogh surely found that beyond political concerns, their business interests drew them together. With Murphy in particular, Morrogh may have found a kindred spirit. Murphy was a rare successful Irish Catholic businessman who had not forgotten his nationalist grounding and chose to live and invest in Ireland — not London, the choice of many successful Irishmen.Footnote ⁹⁴ Upon his return to Ireland, Morrogh was likewise determined to work towards Irish self-government and economic development.Footnote ⁹⁵ In his meetings with Parnell, the creation of Irish industries must have been a key area of agreement. For Morrogh, Parnell’s disgrace had jeopardised not only Ireland’s home rule but also its industrial development. A man of action, who ‘hated sham and pretense’, Morrogh was aggravated by the intrigues of his fellow Irish nationalists and loath to waste time.Footnote ⁹⁶

For a brief time after he resigned, Morrogh, until then little known in Westminster, evoked a flurry of interest.Footnote ⁹⁷ He was identified with Rhodes (‘One of Mr. Cecil Rhodes’ young lions’)Footnote ⁹⁸ and with Healy (‘One of the milch cows of the Bantry gang … [who was] tired of having to pay so stiffly for the barren honour of being a vassal of King Tim’).Footnote ⁹⁹ He was criticised for quitting, the Evening Herald arguing that ‘[Mr. Morrogh’s] resignation at this critical moment is a wicked stab at the back of Home Rule … But what does he care?’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ A week after Morrogh’s resignation, a notice appeared in the Herald: ‘[Morrogh] came from South Africa in the hope of becoming a great statesman, and [now] he has to be satisfied with a common or garden councillorship, that is if he can get it’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ But Morrogh had other things to keep him occupied.

III

In October 1889, the Irish Times reported that the Donnybrook Textile Mill in Douglas, up for sale since 1885, had been sold to a ‘syndicate of Cork gentlemen’.Footnote ¹⁰² The property consisted of fifty acres with a large five-storey mill, weaving sheds, machinery and over fifty worker dwellings. The syndicate was made up of John Morrogh MP, his brother Patrick and Richard A. Atkins, high sheriff of Cork. Thus, even as Morrogh was initiating a political career in Westminster, he was also pursuing commercial opportunities at home. For Morrogh, the two endeavours were in tandem, grounded in his determination to change Ireland. Cork city and its environs had a long tradition in textile production, extending back at least a couple of centuries but had faced stiff competition from technologically advanced English mills with access to capital investment and favourable tariffs.Footnote ¹⁰³ The challenge of reviving production in Douglas offered Morrogh a direct way of helping his countrymen and women, putting a dent in Irish migration, and turning the mill into a showcase of Irish — and especially Corkonian — excellence. It also looked to be a good business proposition.

Advertisement for Morrogh Mill. Author’s personal collection.

In interviews with the Cork Constitution, Morrogh set out his plans to focus on high quality wool with all core stages produced on the premises by some 300 hands. He claimed he provided a healthy — for the time — and modern work environment and carried out renovations, emphasising lighting, ventilation and telephonic communication between factory and city offices.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ He purchased innovative machinery from Belfast foundries and, to train a local workforce, contracted experts from renowned Scottish wool centres. The mill’s markets included traditional ones in Ireland and England and new ones in Europe, South Africa, and North America. Despite the rise in strikes by mill workers across Britain, Morrogh appears to have felt protected from strike action. As he told the reporter, he was an Irish nationalist ‘anxious to promote the well-being of his countrymen in a practical and enduring manner’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This was not an unrealistic perspective for worker militancy was not a high concern in Ireland, where workers believed the real threat to good jobs lay not with local employers but across the Irish Sea.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Workers’ tractability was reinforced by the fact that, as in other textile mills, young women, long used to subordinate family roles, made up a large proportion of the labour force. The mill’s picnics, outings and celebrations, as well as Sunday church attendance, helped foster camaraderie.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Contented workers, Morrogh understood, increased productivity. Visiting journalists commended the mill: ‘The whole character of Douglas is being absolutely transformed’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

In Cork, Morrogh had other business concerns. Interested in shaking up the city’s business torpor, he favoured novel enterprises. He founded the Munster Permanent Building Society, revealing he was informed about a growing movement in Britain — almost unknown in Ireland — to simplify home ownership and, as the Society’s prospectus stated, mould thrifty, responsible citizens.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Also innovative was the Cork Electric Free Wiring Company, which addressed the main impediment to the introduction of electricity into households and businesses. The wiring service was not ‘free’, but it became a manageable payment included in the power company’s monthly statement.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Although he was not directly involved in financing electric tramways in Cork, he must have been a keen promoter of the system that his former anti-Parnellite colleague, William Martin Murphy, built. The Cork Electric Tramway connecting Douglas village to the city was a considerable boon to Morrogh’s textile business and allowed him to move close to the Douglas mill. Even the purchase of the Cork Daily Herald, more closely related to Morrogh’s continuing interest in nationalist politics, was indirectly linked to his businesses for, as he had learned from Cecil Rhodes, control of a newspaper could move both political and business quests.Footnote ¹¹¹

Morrogh also filled influential local government positions; openings made possible by the waning clout of the ascendancy Irish. He served on Cork Corporation, the chamber of commerce, as harbour commissioner, county councillor and justice of the peace.Footnote ¹¹² His position as trustee of the Cork Savings Bank must certainly have been a boon to his business endeavours.Footnote ¹¹³ Like other Corkonian notables, Morrogh’s business, political, civic, and leisure associates overlapped. Thus, for example, Morrogh was a director of Dwyer and Co., a wholesale haberdashery firm among the largest of Cork’s employers, and its owner, James Dwyer, was on the board of the Cork Daily Herald and the Cork Electric and Free Wiring Company.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Martin Flavin, a Sunday’s Well neighbour of Morrogh’s and former MP, was on the boards of the Cork Daily Herald and Munster Permanent Building Society; he also joined Morrogh on the Crosshaven and Currabinny Regatta Committee.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Maurice Healy was on the board of the Cork Lunatic Asylum with Morrogh, on the Cork Daily Herald board and on the committee for the Cork Charitable Coal Fund.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Other than his partner and friend Atkins, a Quaker, his colleagues included a number of Cork’s urban Protestants, a dynamic group whose interests — in contrast to those of the waning landed aristocracy — were linked to Irish industry and commerce. Sir John H. Scott, leader of the Cork Conservatives, nominated Morrogh to the Harbour Commission (both men were directors of the Cork Lunatic Asylum, members of Cork Corporation and partners in the Free Wiring Company),Footnote ¹¹⁷ and Loftus Scully, also a unionist, declared Ireland ‘would be a very different country’ if it had ‘more men like Mr. Morrogh’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ At the turn of the century, a speaker assessing Ireland’s recent industrial awakening, noted: ‘The past thirty years has been a period of political activity and unrest. We now require a period of manufacturing and commercial activity. We need men to come to the front like Mr. Horace Plunkett; people like the Mahoneys of Blarney; the O’Briens and Morrogh of Douglas. These men have built up splendid industries and disseminated happiness and prosperity in County Cork’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Not everyone had such laudatory views. When Morrogh, Scott and other corporation members tried unsuccessfully to land the business of supplying Cork electricity, the Cork Constitution criticised their use of government positions to secure business.Footnote ¹²⁰ Morrogh brushed off such criticisms through his own newspaper: ‘We are sick of hearing innuendoes of corruption … against those who support big projects like that of a Tramway system for Limerick. Why should not a public man meet with the promoters in a hotel or anywhere else he pleases?’Footnote ¹²¹

Some of Morrogh’s most venomous detractors came from his own anti-Parnellite camp. One of the most outspoken was Eugene Crean, then mayor of Cork.Footnote ¹²² During one board meeting of the Cork Lunatic Asylum, Crean called Morrogh an ‘African millionaire’ and a ‘contemptible creature’.Footnote ¹²³ Unlike Morrogh, Crean asserted, ‘I did not buy my position on this Board’. This was a telling confrontation, for Crean’s outburst expressed the anti-imperialism of many nationalists and, too, their resentment, since 1889, at having had Morrogh thrust into the midst of the political arena because of his money, not grass-roots activism.Footnote ¹²⁴ Nevertheless, in April 1899, Morrogh, now living in Douglas, was elected county councillor for Douglas and Blackrock by a large majority.Footnote ¹²⁵ As the news of the election result spread, there was (Morrogh’s newspaper claimed) jubilation all over the district, particularly in the village of Douglas, where a ‘triumphant procession’ serenaded ‘one of the biggest employers in Cork’. As councillor, Morrogh showed more character than in Westminster. Taking unpopular stands, he was against the unification of the IPP, remained a Healy supporter, berated the duplicity of former tenants who, after the Ashbourne Act, became landowners and failed to support funding the IPP, and backed the war against the Boers in South Africa. He deflected the insults he got with humour.Footnote ¹²⁶ He appeared to be enjoying himself as, in ‘singularly robust health’, he stood on the threshold of many more years of helping to forge a new Ireland.Footnote ¹²⁷ Within eighteen months of his successful election, he was dead of cancer.Footnote ¹²⁸

IV

Image from Centenary Record of the Christian Brothers Cork, 1811–1911 (Cork, 1911), p. 177. Public Domain.

The span of John Morrogh’s eventful life cannot be understood separately from the British Empire. Young, ambitious, his sensibilities shaped by a nationalism imbibed through his Christian Brothers schooling and inherited memories of English misrule, his prospects in Cork limited, Morrogh turned, like many other young Irishmen, to the empire. If at home he was disempowered by low social status and a religious prejudice, in the empire he joined the ranks of white imperial men who profited from exploiting indigenous populations. The skills he learned in the Empire and the wealth it yielded made him wealthy and confident. During his years in South Africa, he learned about a much larger world, still with Britain at its centre, while, from exchanges with men like Cecil Rhodes, he came to believe that people in this expanded world would flourish most when they governed themselves and remained under the overarching umbrella of the British Empire (they took it for granted that autonomy was for whites). If he had ever entertained some form of separatism for Ireland, he now believed that home rule and self-reliance, not separatism, were best. ‘My experience at Westminster has convinced me more strongly than ever,’ Morrogh stated upon resigning as MP, ‘of the necessity of a native parliament in Ireland’.Footnote ¹²⁹ His position was grounded in pragmatism, not idealism: the British Empire, as Morrogh knew from experience, had much to offer the Irish. Nevertheless, Morrogh’s relationship to Britain remained ambiguous. As a capitalist entrepreneur, he saw England as a model to be emulated, but as an Irish nationalist, it was an adversary to be challenged. When he deemed the squabbling of IPP politics a waste of his time, and on being outmaneuvered in his quest for greater influence, he cut his losses and focused on the business and politics of Cork, and ignored derogatory labels, such as ‘West Briton’ and ‘Whig’ following in his wake.Footnote ¹³⁰ In his Douglas mill, he introduced reforming ideas for work environments, no longer the harsh imperial overseer of coercive labor relations but a paternalistic employer. Beyond the mill, he sought transformation: he promoted electric power; set up building societies to encourage homeownership; and pushed for electric transportation in Cork city and its environs.

There must have been times when holding a balance between what were essentially opposing emotional positions became difficult, and the issue that surely caused the most tension in Morrogh — English admirer/imperial beneficiary/Irish nationalist — was the unfolding crisis in South Africa, which in the 1890s radicalised Irish nationalism. The outbreak of the second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) was the culmination of decades of distrust and hostility between the British government and two Afrikaner (Boer) states.Footnote ¹³¹ Whereas the Tories supported the war, and the Liberals were split, the military campaign was opposed by a majority of Irish nationalists. They viewed it as raw aggression against two small states — reminiscent of England’s aggression against Ireland. Some blamed the conflict on ‘that heartless set of scoundrels’ and ‘unscrupulous gang of Capitalists’ who wanted to get their hands on the ‘diamond fields’.Footnote ¹³² A wave of sympathy for the Boers swept across Irish nationalists of all stripes. They organised demonstrations in favour of the Afrikaners, priests spoke in sympathy and newspapers celebrated Boer successes.Footnote ¹³³ The most radical nationalists went so far as to form an Irish Transvaal Brigade to fight alongside the Boers. Morrogh, in contrast to all but a handful of Irish nationalists, knew a great deal about South Africa and the Boers, and far from seeing the latter as an inspiration for Ireland, he saw them as a backward people and an obstacle to progress. Even if, like other De Beers directors, he was aghast at Rhodes’s failed plan to take over the Transvaal (the Jameson Raid 1895–6), he likely sympathised with Rhodes’s dream of unifying the region under the British flag. And he agreed with the minority of Irish nationalists who viewed the Afrikaners as opposed to ‘all the civilizing and progressive influences of the age’ and took a stand against the Irish pro-Boers.Footnote ¹³⁴ Indeed, Morrogh’s newspaper was one of the few Irish papers that backed England. ‘[T]he Boers were … engaging in an attempt to secure supremacy in South Africa,’ noted the paper and England was ‘bound to see the war out to the bitter end. … It cannot hold back or hesitate for a moment. Its prestige is at stake’.Footnote ¹³⁵ In the Irish popular mind, anti-imperialism and home rule may have been linked, but not for Morrogh. He remained an Irish nationalist, but his imperial experience had shaped that nationalism in a distinct manner.

Having ‘made’ himself in the British Empire, Morrogh sought the rewards of upward social mobility. On his return to Cork, he set himself up in style. He purchased a home in the Sunday’s Well neighbourhood (‘the handsomest residential part of the city’), away from the congested city centre, and a decade later, with the arrival of the electric tramway, moved to Douglas which, with Blackrock, was a popular retreat for the well-off.Footnote ¹³⁶ He lived in The Grange, a mansion with thirty-two rooms, three stables, two coach houses and private dwellings on its grounds.Footnote ¹³⁷ His appointments to local government boards and directorships were a part of acquiring social status and recognition, including with middle- and upper-class Protestants, a group that, even as their power fragmented, remained gatekeeper of some elite spaces, such as country clubs and sports clubs.Footnote ¹³⁸ However, Morrogh’s wealth, acquired in a disreputable industry, made him suspect. The nationalist (anti-Healyite) Mayor Crean’s outburst about the provenance of Morrogh’s money, and the political uses to which he had put it, was surely a view that circulated as much among Cork’s unionists as among nationalists.

The education of Morrogh’s thirteen children tells us a good deal about his mindset concerning class, particularly the fact that he chose not to send them to his own alma mater, the Christian Brothers’ North Monastery School. By the final decades of the century, the school, backed by the corporation, the Catholic Church and leading Catholic families, had become an important city institution, educating not only Cork’s poor — mostly at primary level — but also sons of the city’s growing numbers of well-to-do Catholic families.Footnote ¹³⁹ Nevertheless, Morrogh chose to entrust his sons’ education to the Vincentian Castleknock College in Dublin. Although for the election purposes in Douglas, he might extoll the fact that he was ‘the son of a practical working man’ and ‘always a friend to the labourer’, he intended for his children to enter seamlessly into the top tiers of society.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ His sons should acquire the accent, manners, dress, exposure to the classics, as well as love of English sports — rugby and cricket, not hurling — of English or ascendancy gentlemen. Such polish could be garnered at a number of Catholic Irish boarding schools that replicated English ‘public schools’, albeit with a solid Catholic ethos.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Castleknock College emphasised training students for high paying professions and posts in the home and Indian service and, even more important, given the optimism about Ireland in the coming century, preparing young men for leadership roles, a crucial task in the anticipated home rule Ireland.Footnote ¹⁴² When, in 1900, Queen Victoria chose to visit Castleknock College — the only college she visited — Morrogh must have been pleased. By then, his second oldest son, John Dominick, was on his way to Sandhurst, the elite royal military academy in England, long favoured by ascendancy Anglo-Irish and leading Catholic families (Francis, his eldest, was destined to become manager of Morrogh Bros.). Presumably, Castleknock had endowed John Dominick with the appropriate ‘air of gentility’ required for Sandhurst.

The Morrogh family, including four stepsons, around 1910. Kate Griffin Morrogh in centre. Family photo collection.

Indeed, Morrogh had positioned his sons — and his daughters, who attended St Angela’s Convent in Cork and a French finishing school and who, with good dowries, stood to marry wellFootnote ¹⁴³ — on a solid course to take their places as members of the elite in the new autonomous Irish world that, he supposed, was just around the corner. His sons went on to run the woollen mills for several decades where, at least according to the annals of their former school, they were popular employers to staff ‘whom they treat indulgently and with every consideration’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ As befitted any upper-class English or Irishman, they also became ‘sportsmen … exceptionally fond of outdoor sports’, cross-country riders, keen motorists, sailors and cricketers; and, Frank, his eldest, ‘prominently identified with the South Union Hunt’. Six of John Morrogh’s sons joined British forces in the First World War. They fought at Ypres, Somme, Passchendaele and Gallipoli. The eldest died in Gallipoli, others were wounded, and one was a German prisoner of war. If the war transformed these men’s lives, Ireland’s subsequent War of Independence and Civil War displaced them further. None of them played a role in the politics of the new Irish epoch.

How far was Morrogh’s Irish nationalism in tension with his admiration for England and the empire? Nicholas Canny, who poses a similar question of his Irish grandfather, a policeman in Singapore and Malaya, notes ‘that his primary loyalty was to himself, to his family, to his religion, to his local community in Ireland, and to Ireland’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ This was surely true of Morrogh, one of legions of colonised people who, moved by self-interest, actively participated in the empires that ruled them.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ However, Morrogh was not a civil servant securing the empire, but an Irish migrant who profited from it. And although he was always an Irish patriot and chose to invest in Ireland, he continued to reap the rewards of empire as a De Beers director and shareholder in Rhodes’s British South Africa Company. Both a nationalist and an imperialist, Morrogh’s career exemplifies Ireland’s ‘ambivalent heritage’.