In An Irishwoman’s Diary (July 13th), Una Agnew mentioned that the grandfather of poet Patrick Kavanagh owed his first teaching job to Tristram Kennedy, agent for the Bath estate in Ireland.
This was a rare glimpse of the extraordinary Kennedy (1805-1885), earlier sheriff of Londonderry and descendant of another sheriff known as “chief promoter” of the closure of that city’s gates in the face of the army of King James.
Born at Inishowen, Co Donegal, Tristram left behind his career as a lawyer to become in 1846 a land agent. He was popular with his Monaghan tenants at a time of famine, and played a key role in the foundation of the Carrickmacross lace industry.
Representing British landlords could be dangerous. An agent living near him was murdered.
The miserable population on the Bath estate amounted to over 13,500 tenants, each one holding on average less than two acres. But the Londonderry Standard noted that Kennedy "sternly refused to adopt any of the cruel remedies applied in other quarters" during the Great Famine.
He found scarcely one in four of the tenants able to read and write. Within 12 months he had set up seven new national schools. In one of these Patrick Kavanagh’s grandfather worked until 1855.
Tristram’s popularity was partly explained by the fact that he let tenants run up great arrears, and he seems to have been sacked for this.
By 1852 the Protestant Kennedy had left Monaghan, being elected to Westminster as an independent member by Catholic voters in the bordering constituency of Louth.
Commemorations can be unkind to those who do not fit neatly into a particular box, and Kennedy was one such. He should not be forgotten.
Among his achievements was a radical experiment in legal training. The efforts of Kennedy and the Waterford member of parliament Thomas Wyse to reform that field were recognised in the official UK Ormrod report in 1971 as having defined debates about legal education in England for 120 years.
Kennedy founded his Dublin Law Institute in Luke Gardiner's former house at the top of Henrietta Street, behind King's Inns. Today that street remains, as Joyce wrote in Dubliners, "under the shadow of the gaunt spectral mansions in which the old nobility of Dublin had roistered". It should be better preserved.
Kennedy’s institute attracted clever barristers as teachers, including Joseph Napier and James Whiteside, but its pretensions to professional reform were soon undone by the conservative benchers of King’s Inns.
Although his institute closed in 1845, Kennedy continued to buy properties on Henrietta Street until, by the time of his death in 1885, he owned about three-quarters of all its houses. Barristers and law students had rooms there.
The editor of The Irish Times in 1874 thought that the street had "the air of a law university". Kennedy hoped that the benchers might acquire it all at jury valuation and incorporate it within King's Inns by placing a gate at the foot of its hill. That never happened.
Tristram, as Thomas Carlyle noticed, also had energetic brothers. John Pitt Kennedy was the first inspector general of national schools in Ireland, acquiring for teacher-training purposes the lands at Glasnevin on which the Albert College was later built and where Dublin City University now stands.
Evory, an obstetrician, was by the age of 27 master of the Rotunda Hospital, Dublin, and later president of the Royal College of Physicians.
Tristram joined with John Blake Dillon MP to build bridges between Irish Catholics and independent liberals, but his own support for integrated education left him vulnerable to what one correspondent described as the “golden and religious apple of discord” and he withdrew from politics in 1868.
Inspired by his sister Mary, he had introduced lace-making into his Monaghan schools and later provided credit to the local industry that grew up there. The National Museum of Ireland has a fine appliqué shawl that the grateful lace-makers of Carrickmacross presented to his English wife when, aged 57, he married Sarah.
Kennedy prided himself on being "always faithful and true to the poor people" and, true to form, the couple's London home served as an English agency for Carrickmacross lace. His descendants possess a striking and forgotten portrait of Tristram, painted about 1877 by Henry MacManus, which they kindly permitted me to reproduce in Tristram Kennedy and the Revival of Irish Legal Training 1835-1885 (Irish Academic Press, 1996).