Gordon Lucy: William Sharman Crawford - the nineteenth century landlord and MP who fought for rights of tenants

​On 15 March 1848 he introduced a tenant-right bill in the House of Commons but it went down to defeat the following month. Crawford’s objective was to put the so-called Ulster Custom on a firm legal basis and its extension to the whole island.

In broad terms, Ulster Custom provided tenants in Ulster with an expectation of security of tenure as long as they paid their rent, and allowed them to sell the right to occupy their holding to another tenant acceptable to the landlord.

During his parliamentary career Crawford introduced eight such bills, none of which was successful. Crawford called tenant right ‘the darling object of my heart’. His Conservative opponents mocked his tenacious advocacy of tenant right as ‘Crawford's craze’.

Nevertheless, it is worth noting that in 1843 Crawford managed to persuade Sir Robert Peel, the Conservative prime minister, to establish the Devon Commission to investigate the Irish land question. While the report acknowledged the benefits of the Ulster Custom to tenants, unfortunately the report condemned it as subversive of property rights.

William Sharman, the eldest son of William Sharman of Moira Castle, Co Down, took the surname Crawford in 1826 after inheriting the estates of his brother-in-law, John Crawford of Crawfordsburn. (The Crawfords were an Ulster-Scots family that rented land which became known as Crawfordsburn from Sir James Hamilton. In 1670 the family purchased the estate from the Earl of Clanbrasil.) Combined with the estates inherited from his father, he was a very substantial Ulster landlord. As a liberal and radical, his earliest political activism was in support of ‘Catholic emancipation’.

He unsuccessfully contested Co Down in 1831 and Belfast in 1832 but was elected to the House of Commons as MP for Dundalk in 1835. Stepping down from this seat in 1837, he served as MP for Rochdale from 1841 to 1852 - largely because of his support for the Chartist movement.

The six demands of the Chartist programme illustrate how radical Crawford was in his politics:

l Universal manhood suffrage

l Voting by secret ballot

l Annual elections to Parliament

l Constituencies of equal size

l Payment of MPs

l The abolition of the property qualification for MPs

One may observe in passing, each one of these demands have since been met except the demand for annual elections.

As MP for Rochdale, Crawford devoted much of his time to Irish issues. He proposed a federal union between Great Britain and Ireland in contrast to Daniel O'Connell's 'Repeal' movement.

As Frank Wright explained in ‘Two Lands on One Soil: Ulster Politics before Home Rule’ (1996), Crawford favoured Repeal ‘in the abstract’.

In November 1843 he argued that federalism was a compromise between the Union and Repeal of the Union. Political scientists might query whether what he was arguing for was strictly federalism. He contended Ireland should be given powers like those given to ‘Canada’ in 1840 and that Ireland should continue to send MPs to Westminster (which might suggest that what he was advocating was closer to devolution than federalism). While Daniel O’Connell was initially receptive to Crawford’s proposals, O’Connell ultimately repudiated them.

In May 1848 Crawford returned to the subject of Repeal, setting out his thoughts on the subject in a letter read at public meeting of the Protestant Repeal Association:

‘I consider that no beneficial result could arise from a Repeal of the Union unless carried by the joint approval of Protestants and Catholics … I apprehend that a Repeal of the Union, if carried by Catholic power against the general opinion of the Protestant community, would either have (the effect of an assertion of Catholic power over Protestant interests) or else produce a continued and aggravated struggle between Catholic and Protestant, and create an extent of evil which would counteract every benefit that might otherwise be anticipated from the locality of legislation. But if Protestants came forward to join their Catholic countrymen in demanding a Repeal of the Union, the objection I have stated at once vanishes’.

While Crawford explained he was prepared to argue for Repeal, he ‘would resist any attempt to carry it by violent or seditious means, of any description’.

In his final electoral foray - the general election of 1852 - he contested Co Down on a platform of tenant right. The Downshire and Londonderry families, the county’s major landowners, mobilised the Orange Order against him in a rowdy campaign and ensured his defeat. Crawford’s support for Repeal was his Achilles’ heel. After his defeat Crawford retired from public life.

Crawford had significant deficiencies as a politician, some of which many might consider virtues. He was a poor public speaker (not necessarily an insurmountable obstacle to success) and was high-minded and unwilling to compromise (which unfortunately usually proves fatal to success in parliamentary horse-trading). Charles Gavan Duffy summarised the man as ‘proud, punctilious, and angular, unlikely to forget past affronts, and more solicitous to be conspicuously right than to be successful’. None of these are the attributes of a successful or effective politician.

He died on died 17 October 1861 at Crawfordsburn. Obituaries were almost uniformly kind, generously acknowledging his integrity, sense of duty and his devotion to the welfare of tenant farmers.

In 1864 an impressive obelisk was erected to his memory at his estate at Rademon, near Crossgar. One panel explains:

‘This monument has been erected by a grateful and attached tenantry,and other friends in memory of one, who during a long life,was ever the most kind and considerate landlord,the friend of the poor, and universal advocate of tenant rightand every measure calculated to promote civil and religious liberty.’

The final decade of Crawford’s life was marked by disappointment that his efforts had proved so ineffective, calling to mind Jemmy Hope’s observation about living in hope and dying in despair. As tenant right was conceded by Gladstone’s land acts of 1870 and 1881, his misfortune was that he did not live long enough to see ‘the darling object’ of his heart realised.