Samuel Young: East Cavan’s own whiskey brewing nonagenarian MP
Jonathan Smyth's latest Times Past column remembers Samuel Young the 96 year old Cavan Home Rule MP.
In May 1913, the long lasting East Cavan MP Samuel Young received a mention in the New Zealand Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic Review who said he had turned 92 earlier that year on February 25 and that the great man of the Irish Home Rule movement, who they described as the staunchest supporter of self-government for the Irish, had another bow to his arrow for he was also the head owner of Young, King and Company, the whiskey distillers of Belfast.
They called him the nonagenarian distiller, and thankfully he was legally entitled to distil unlike many of the local enterprises further south in another Ulster county, where there was an unbeaten record of distillation being practised and the county in question was Cavan, the East of which Young was elected to represent in the English parliament. As we said, drink-making in Cavan was not for the most part kosher and after a quick delve into records at Cavan Library you quickly learn that between 1800 and 1850 the county had a huge amount of unauthorised alcohol production taking place and the names of those erstwhile beverage creatives are now recorded in the ledger’s pages for posterity.
Young first stood for election as the MP for East Cavan in 1892 and he never shied from telling the English parliamentarians of his nationalist aspirations and once told them he had been a Home Ruler in the days of Daniel O’Connell, long before a Home Rule Bill was ever heard or thought of in the House of Commons when the prospect of such a bill was still in nappies.
Born on Valentine’s Day in 1822 Samuel came from Portaferry, County Down, and began his working life as a clerk in a Belfast woollen company where they later made him one of the partners in the firm. He would later want to team up with a man named George King who was into the whiskey blending business and both of them purchased a distillery at Limavaddy, Co Derry in the early years of the 1880s. Whiskey was not Young’s only industrial pursuit: he was also a serving chairman of the famous bakery business that was started by Barney Hughes in Belfast.
Although the Young family were of Presbyterian stock, Samuel himself was a practising member of the Church of Ireland faith and in the Dictionary of Irish Biography it is recorded that Young went against type in his political allegiances, and he was tolerant of Roman Catholicism.’ The Act of Union was an abhorrence to him, and he wanted it gone and Gladstone’s efforts in that direction earned his admiration. Tenant rights were high on his to-do list of requirements for the Irish people and the right to self-government in general were counted high among his priorities.
In 1892 at the age of 70 he bravely entered the political arena to contest as an ‘anti-Parnellite’ candidate for the East Cavan constituency and over the ‘years was to successfully retain his seat in the ‘next five elections unopposed’, as stated by Linde Lunney in her fascinating entry on Samuel Young in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.
Cootehill
Being a politician is at times like one of them balancing acts found on a circus tightrope and it is hard to have it right all of the time. Two things happened to land Samuel Young in hot water during the summer of 1902. Firstly, he voted against the Eight Hours Miner’s Bill, and secondly, he had contentedly accepted an invitation to King Edward’s Coronation which was supposed to take place in June but was postponed to August 9 because of the King’s hospitalization for appendicitis.
With characteristic vigour, Young addressed these concerns raised in a Belfast newspaper about his recent actions of which he had already informed a meeting in Cootehill, but the Press had picked up on it and decided to make a meal out of the story. In a letter he wrote to the Belfast Newsletter he sought to set the record straight in ‘as friendly a manner’ as possible, even though none of his Cavan constituents had communicated any disapproval towards him.
He went against the Miner’s Bill, he said, because he did not think it was helpful and he cited various reasons for his decision, for example, that ‘by shortening the time of work the output would be lessened, and consequently the price of coal at the pit’s mouth would be advanced,’ and he wondered why a question concerning English coal would go against him in East Cavan. He wrote of his Cavan constituents: ‘I cannot understand how the hardworking farmers and people generally could blame me – and, in fact, I am sure they do not – for voting against a measure which would tend to advance a commodity so essential to the comfort of every home.’
Young then continued, with a ‘brief word’ as regarding the forthcoming Coronation. He said he had secured tickets for himself and his family to attend the crowning event and said that in general he accepted a ‘limited monarchy’ and in wrapping up his thoughts, added that ‘attending the Coronation function is a matter of taste, which I think may fairly be left to myself.’ To quash any further doubt expressed by the media, he concluded his letter by reminding readers that at the very same meeting held in Cootehill which started the whole furore, a vote of confidence in their MP, Samuel Young, ‘was carried by 82 to 22’ votes.
Gladstone they say was the celebrated Grand old Man of the English political system, but it’s fair to say that the Irish Nationalist MP, Samuel Young, although young by name, he was at that time the oldest MP to have sat in the House of Commons in a seat which he held until he died in Belfast, at 96 years of age, on April 18, 1918.
A funny story told about Young, speaks about the time when somebody was supposed to have stopped him and gave him a slagging for producing whiskey to which he replied with a laugh in his voice, that none of the drink he produced in Ireland was ever sold in Ireland, ‘so that it killed nobody but Englishmen.’
Perhaps, it may not have been the best of slogans for Young’s distillery, but it was a good answer that helped put a ‘smart alec’ back in his box.
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