Tea merchant who founded the British Home Rule Association

Jonathan Smyth's latest Times Past column looks at Thomas Lough, a tea merchant from Cavan who founded an organisation called the British Home Rule Association...

The Loughs were a prolific Cavan family that boasted two famous brothers, namely Thomas and Arthur. But for the purpose of this week’s column, I will only focus on Thomas Lough, the Liberal Party MP for Islington West, London, and founder of the British Home Rule Association who as a parliamentarian was considered the staunchest supporter of Home Rule in the party. However, his brother, Arthur Lough, and his pioneering work in the Irish cooperative movement will receive consideration on another occasion.

Family

Thomas’s parents were Matthew Lough and Martha Lough née Steel, a daughter of William Steel, to whom he was born on March 28, 1850. Following on from Thomas Lough’s schooling under the Rev. William Prior Moore at the Royal School, Cavan, he attended the Wesleyan Connexional School in Dublin, and then afterwards from about 1870, he was living in England and at 30 years of age became a tea merchant in the ‘big smoke’ of London City.

According to the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, the former Lough family home, Killynebber House, was built in 1874 by Thomas Lough. Killynebber House is situated close to Cavan town and is a fine Victorian style property. The house was later in the possession of the Finlay family who, like the Loughs, were staunch exponents of the benefits of agricultural cooperation. Members of the Lough family also resided at Drumullac, Killeshandra.

Ramsay McDonald

Thomas began to consider a career in politics and after mulling the matter over, felt that the Liberal Party best suited his political temperament. In 1886, he geared himself up to stand in the general election as Liberal candidate for Truro but failed to gain a seat.

Lough’s next move was to appoint Ramsay McDonald as his private secretary. Austen Morgan’s biography on the life of ‘J. Ramsay MacDonald’ noted that: ‘By the Spring of 1888, MacDonald was back in London working as private secretary to Thomas Lough the Irish born Liberal and Radical candidate for West Islington who had founded the Home Rule Union some months earlier’. Incidentally, MacDonald was himself involved in the Scottish Home Rule Association and in 1923 MacDonald famously became the first Labour prime minister of Britain, and the first prime minister to hail from a working class background having some years earlier joined Keir Hardie’s newly formed Labour Party in 1894.

Thomas Lough was successfully elected MP for Islington West, London, and held that seat from July 4, 1892 to December 14, 1918 and as a Liberal Party member had been a great supporter of William Ewart Gladstone. Thomas Lough was of Anglo-Irish stock and was considered something of a radical in outlook compared to most of his contemporaries in the Liberal Party, especially when it came to his support of the Home Rule cause.

High Taxation

High taxation being levied on ordinary subjects, disgruntled Lough, as can be seen in his replies to the House of Commons which are recorded in the Hansard parliamentary records. For example, on February 16, 1893 as MP for Islington West, he questioned MPs about the hike in railway rates that were introduced in January of that year, by asking: ‘I beg to ask the President of the Board of Trade if he is aware that the railway rates throughout the Kingdom were advanced in the vast majority of cases on the 1st of January this year, although the Railway Companies undertook before legislation was sanctioned that no such advances should take place; and whether, in the interest of the industries whose very existence in many cases is threatened by these advances, he is willing to intimate to the various companies that the rates charged during 1892 should in all cases be restored.’

Lough, in his book, ‘England’s Wealth Ireland’s Poverty’, stated his opinions regarding England’s treatment of Ireland, in which he believed the Irish had been so overtaxed by successive British governments since 1853, that she had no surplus income to its detriment, but which was to the advantage and betterment of the English man’s standard of living when the taxes reached Britain’s coffers.

Other writings by Thomas Lough which are held in Cavan Library include, for example, ‘Glimpses of Early Ireland’, and ‘Irish Finance: a paper read before the Royal Society of Economics on January 12, 1912, and Parliament during the war’. In 1903, Lough promoted his hopes of forming a Carnegie Library in Cavan town and emphasised that there was every possibility of obtaining a grant. However, the town would have to wait another 27 years to have its own library.

In 1907, Lough was appointed Lord Lieutenant of County Cavan and ascended to the privy council in the same year which meant that he was now an adviser on matters of importance to King Edward VII. Lough’s role as a regional Lord Lieutenant allowed him to act as ‘custos rotulorum’ which was a fancy title given to the chief Justice of the Peace for the county. From 1905 to 1908, he was the parliamentary secretary in London.

On 11 January 1922, Thomas Lough died at his London address, 97 Ashley Gardens. The Breifny Antiquarian Journal for 1922 contained an obituary for Thomas Lough. Interestingly, Mrs Lough, his widow, who by then lived in Killeshandra, donated her husband’s library collection to the Breifny Antiquarian Society. The contents of the collection covered subjects ranging from general history and antiquities of Ireland, local history, political economy, Irish biography, literature and miscellaneous. Eventually, the books held by the Breifny Antiquarian Society were given a new home in Cavan County Library during Sara Cullen’s time.

Thomas Lough had been a strong supporter of the historical society, and it seems fitting that his books, in addition to some artefacts in his possession were safely placed in the society’s care.

The Breifny Journal’s obituary noted that they keenly felt his demise having lost one of ‘its best informed individuals’ on the county’s past and present. The Loughs were indeed one of the most productive and progressive families to have come out of the county.

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