Bobbett, Elizabeth (1897-1971)--DB5000

Biographical Notes

Date of birth and date of death

1897-1971

Maiden name, place of origin

Clonsilla, Dublin

Marital status, religious denomination, children

Single, Catholic

Social background, family connections

Daughter of William Bobbett; Sister of Patrick and William Bobbett

Education, occupation and public functions

Education

St. Joseph's Sacred Heart College, Roscrea

Occupation

Farmer in Kilbride, County Wicklow

Functions in agricultural institutions

Irish Farmers' Federation (IFF): Founder member and General Secretary 1937-1954; National Farmers' Association: First president of the Wicklow county executive 1963-; UFPA: Member 1930-

Functions in other institutions

Political activities

Candidate in the General Election 1943 (Clann na Talmhan, unsuccessful) and in 1953 (Independent, unsuccessful); Wicklow County Council: Member 1950-

Short Biography

Elizabeth Frances Bobbett was born on 14 October 1898 into the relatively privileged world of the Catholic strong farmer class. Her mother, Catherine Beveridge (1874-26.1.1939), was the second of six children of Elizabeth Teeling and John Francis Beveridge (1845-1893), Barrister-at-Law and Town Clerk of Dublin. Elizabeth Bobbett’s father, William P. Bobbett (1849-14.9.1924), was a big farmer who owned around 300 acres of farmland in Dublin and Meath. The family lived in Hansfield House, Clonsilla, County Dublin. William Bobbett, was also a cattle dealer, a breeder of horses, a Justice of the Peace, and Chairman of the Lucan and Blanchardstown Petty Sessions Court. Catherine Beveridge and William Bobbett married in 1896. Their first child Elizabeth Frances Mary, or Lily as she was known to her family throughout her life, had two younger brothers. Patrick studied medicine at Trinity College. After practicing for nine years in India he returned to England where he worked in medicine in Middlesex before retiring to Ireland. William, the youngest of the three children, qualified as an engineer before emigrating to England where he worked (and died) in London. None of the three Bobbett siblings was to have children of their own.

At the age of twelve Elizabeth was sent to the Sacred Heart School in Roscrea, County Tipperary, where she boarded from September 1910 until July 1912. Clearly a bright and attentive student, Elizabeth won 1st prize in science, 2nd prize in English and a certificate for diligence in her first year in Roscrea. She was further awarded 4th green ribbon. By dint of finishing top of her class in June 1912, she was awarded 1st green ribbon along with 1st prize in science and 2nd prize in English and French.

Rather little is known in detail about what Elizabeth Bobbett was up to in the seven years between leaving Roscrea in 1912 and becoming a full-time farmer in Wicklow in 1919. What we do know is that she continued to reside with her parents after leaving boarding school. She recalled in 1938 how she had stayed ‘on the farm because she was supposed to be so delicate that she would not live anywhere else’. It was for her that William Bobbett paid £3,660 at auction in late 1917 for the 201-acre Springfield farm in Kilbride, County Wicklow. Less than two years later Elizabeth took charge of the Springfield farm where she continued to live until her death in 1971.

While living at home before transferring to Wicklow, Elizabeth was becoming familiar with the ins and outs of how to run a farming business. Well known as a progressive sheep farmer since the 1880s, William Bobbett also kept and bred cattle and horses and was heavily involved (not always successfully) in buying and selling cattle. An active member of the Cattle Traders’ Association, he served as a member of the association’s executive committee for a few years before the First World War. From a wartime court case in the spring of 1917 we learn that Elizabeth was rearing sheep while residing at home in Clonsilla. The litigation in question involved a girl and a women being sued by Elizabeth Bobbett for trespassing on lands in Westmanstown, and for cutting down young trees and carrying away the timber. Questioned by her father, who sat on the bench as one of the Justices of the Peace (but did not adjudicate in the case), Elizabeth testified that cutting down fences had led to people trespassing on the land and to placing livestock in danger. Two lambs, she claimed, had already been lost in this way. Bobbett made it clear that she did not wish to press for damages against the defendants, ‘but merely wished to have the practice stopped’. In spite of owning extensive property, William Bobbett appears to have been in serious financial difficulties since at least the early years of the twentieth century. Without success he had tried to sell Hansfield House with its farm ‘of splendid land’ in 1907 - an advertisement lauded the property as ‘one of the most desirable residential farms in Ireland’. There are indications that the family’s finances went from bad to worse during and after the 1914-18 War. It seems that William lost substantial sums of money in his trading activities and on the stock exchange. So heavily indebted was the Clonsilla property when William died in 1924 that his heirs were obliged, under pressure from the bank, to sell Hansfield House and farm in the spring of 1925. To help clear William’s debts, his wife and daughter were further required to waive their claims to legacies and to an annuity in favour of the bank. At the time William Bobbett bequeathed the Springfield farm in Kilbride to his only daughter there was already a continuing charge of £2,000 to the Royal Bank of Ireland on the property.

After the enforced sale of Hansfield House and farm, Catherine Bobbett moved to live with her daughter Elizabeth in Wicklow. They lived in Springfield farm’s substantial country house until Catherine’s death in 1939. During these interwar years the farm was run as a mixed livestock-tillage enterprise. Working together with up to four full-time agricultural labourers, Bobbett was producing potatoes, wheat and oats, raising store cattle, sheep, and pigs, chickens and hens as well as milking cows. In 1933 she had 38 acres under the plough. The farm was also home to horses and to a donkey. The continuing importance of horses in Elizabeth’s life can be seen in the prizes she won for hunters and fillies at the County Wicklow Agricultural Show, which the resuscitated County Wicklow Agricultural Society organised annually from 1931 onwards. We also find her judging ponies at the yearly show of the Irish Pony Society as well as riding her mare Brownie B. at horse-jumping competitions. For many years Elizabeth followed the Ward Union Hounds in North County Dublin.

As much as Elizabeth Bobbett saw herself in the late 1930s as a producer of food for the people and as one of the ‘wealth producers of the nation’, it was already clear by the close of the 1920s that her hold on Springfield farm had become more precarious as her financial circumstances continued to worsen. By 1932 the bank debt on the Springfield farm may have been reduced, but it could not dissuade the Royal Bank of Ireland from getting an order for the sale of the farm in April 1932, thereby ruining Bobbett’s credit. Contributing to Bobbett’s crippling financial woes in the early 1930s were the price collapses affecting a wide range of agricultural produce, rising farming costs and increases in the local property taxation known as the rates that were levied annually by the local authorities.

When Bobbett was summoned for non-payment of rates in April 1933, Wicklow County Council had been added to the list of her main creditors. During the proceedings, prominently publicised in the Wicklow People, Michael Roche, the poor law rate collector for Kilbride, explained that Bobbett now owed £13 in rates arrears. In her evidence, Elizabeth accepted that the sum in question was indeed as yet unpaid, but pleaded for a stay of execution of three months and promised to clear the debt in instalments. It was, she claimed, ‘owing to the depression in agriculture’ that the money owed could not be paid right away. She went on to tell the court that she had written, albeit in vain, to all her constituency TDs as well as to the Minister for Local Government in relation to the matter.

Roche the rate collector, whose income depended on the amount of rates he could collect, told the court that ‘all the poorer people in the locality’ had ‘paid long before’. ‘She was’, in his view, ‘the best off in the countryside’, pointing out how she travelled ‘around in a big saloon motor car’. In her defence, Bobbett drew the court’s attention to how ‘she had never defaulted before” and emphasised how it was bad financial circumstances that had forced this action on her. It ‘is not my fault if I default’ she wrote in a letter published in the Wicklow People after the County Council had again brought legal proceedings against her to recover a much larger sum in unpaid rates five years later. As to the car, Bobbett revealed in 1933 how this ‘belonged to her mother and a friend’ and how she ‘only had the use of it’. She further testified that her brother had provided her with money from the sale of his cattle to pay the rates in 1932, and how he was now helping her to ‘pay the men’s wages’. Bobbett also informed the court that there was no market for her potatoes and that she had no funds to pay her workmen beyond another week.

This court appearance of April 1933 proved to be a decisive moment in Elizabeth Bobbett’s formation as an activist in the farmers’ cause. On the strength of it she began to realise that her inability to pay her rates should not be regarded as an entirely private matter. If dedicated and hard-working farmers like herself who were cultivating fairly fertile land were unable to pay their rates, rent (or land annuities) and interest charges on mortgaged property, then surely many other similarly circumstanced Irish farmers were likely to be experiencing similar difficulties. What all this pointed to was that it was far too simple to interpret the financial difficulties farmers in general were experiencing as the product of purely private shortcomings. Something else beginning to dawn on Bobbett was that embattled farmers like herself were justified in resorting to collective action so as to politicise their predicament and to defend their interests. With these ideas taking shape in her head and leaving her receptive to collective action, she set out on what was to be a long and eventful journey as an activist devoted to constituting Irish farmers as an organised economic interest and to restoring agriculture’s position as a dynamic sector of the national economy.

On 29 June 1933, just a few weeks after her court appearance in Wicklow, she attended the annual convention of the United Farmers Protection Association (UFPA) in the Mansion House in Dublin. ‘I was’, she recalled more than a decade later, ‘much impressed at the speeches I heard there and delighted to know there were some farmers ready to fight for their rights’. Apparently one speech in particular made a deep impression on her. ‘I was inspired’, she revealed some years later, ‘to take a keen interest in the necessity for organisation of the farming community, chiefly by the speech of Mr. Ernest Brown of Clonboy, O’Brien’s Bridge, Co. Clare’.

Inspired by her experience at the UFPA’s June convention of 1933, Elizabeth Bobbett threw herself into a campaign to build a greater organisational presence for the UFPA in County Wicklow. She was elected secretary of her local Barndarrig branch in the autumn of 1933, and a little later she became the UFPA’s county secretary for Wicklow. Her activism substantially contributed to Wicklow becoming the county in which the UFPA had its strongest presence.

Besides being a formative moment in Elizabeth Bobbett’s development as a farmer activist, the year 1933 would also prove to be a milestone in the history of the UFPA. Since its inception in 1929, primarily to deal with the ‘frozen debts’ farmers had incurred during the years of monetary inflation, the UFPA had been broadly supportive of Fianna Fáil, firstly as a party of opposition and then as a party of power from 1932. The de-rating of agricultural land and buildings – a demand that Fianna Fáil had supported while in opposition - was another central plank of the UFPA’s programme. And Fianna Fáil’s self-sufficiency policy, committed to increasing the tillage acreage so as to boost home-produced food and fodder, was viewed as promoting the economic interests of the tillage farmers that constituted a large strand of the UFPA’s membership. It was as a result of the UFPA being perceived as broadly pro-government that James Ryan, the recently re-appointed minister for agriculture, was willing to address the same UFPA annual convention that Bobbett attended at the end of June 1933.

References

Own publications

Sources

Keywords

Irlande