‘As a Christian minister, I reckon it a solemn duty to promote the virtues of peace and charity, both by precept and example, amongst my brethren and countrymen, of all religious persuasions.  As a man, I esteem it an honour to give my humble, yet honest support to any measures which tend to establish feelings of good will and mutual esteem…’^[ii]

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(11) 

He was born in The Moy in County Tyrone , and he owes his unusual appellation to the curious circumstance which brought his father to this country in the first place.

            As a young man, William Brown set out from his home in Scotland with his friend, en route for Persia, believing that there they would find a ripe harvest ready for the reaping in terms of souls eager to receive the word of God.  It seemed that the Almighty had different plans for the ardent young men, for the ship got into difficulties and was wrecked off the Skerries, and the two found themselves safe on dry land but very far from their destination.  We may imagine their disappointment, even disillusionment, on finding that, like Job, it was a case of Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further, but having taken stock of their situation they decided that the message was clear: they were being directed to start their ministry nearer to home.  So William came to Tyrone, and when, in January 1808, he and his young wife celebrated the birth of a son, he named him after the friend of his youth: Daniel Gunn.

            Our Daniel Gunn Brown was brought up in a culture of religion and learning and it was no great surprise that he should follow his father into the Christian ministry.  He received his early education in Armagh before going on to Belfast College , where he distinguished himself both by his assiduousness and his personal qualities.  Many of his tutors make mention of the nobility of his demeanour and his gentlemanly bearing, traits that would be associated with him throughout his long life.  He continued to impress academically when he went on to complete his theological studies at Edinburgh University , winning accolades and prizes in several disciplines.  One of his essay topics was ‘Philosophy of Poor Laws’, from which we can infer that from a very early age, Daniel was conscious that moral and religious precepts must underpin all the undertakings of men and government, and it was this conviction that influenced his every thought and action during his ministry.  MacMillan^[iii] asserts that in his first sermon ‘he struck the keynote of his life…to bring the Gospel to bear on personal conduct, social customs, and national laws.’  His insistence on this is passionate, and carries the weight of conviction and logic even when we read his words almost two hundred years later.  He was appointed to the joint charge of Creggan^[iv] and Newtownhamilton, but in 1835 the congregations were disunited after the Freeduff folk took issue with the Armagh Presbytery, with Brown opting to remain in Newtownhamilton, where he spent another thirty-seven years.

            His facility as a preacher has already been suggested, and he was invited to preach from many a pulpit throughout the country, and even further afield.  In 1844 he visited Dundee , and was so well received that there was a general inclination to invite him to stay.  Despite his poor remuneration at home he declined all efforts to secure his removal thence, and the explanation he offered to those who expressed surprise at his diffidence reveals a man who is sincerely driven by vocational zeal.  His people at home needed him:  ‘If I should go away now, who would come and work here?’  It was that simple.

            And they did need him, not just to minister to their spiritual welfare, but to give a voice to those who were often unrepresented.  As early as 1838 we find him taking the platform at public meetings, not only  to denounce violence and wrong-doing, but to remind his hearers that they all share a common heritage, and that their greatest strength lies in unity.  His remarks are strikingly relevant even today, despite the contemporary phraseology, as he inveighs against those who call themselves Christian yet do not adhere to the creed they so vociferously advance.  In the spring of that year a number of ‘outrages’ or violent crimes had been committed in and around the Barony of the Upper Fews in South Armagh, and a public meeting was called in Cullyhanna to exhort the people to co-operate with the forces of law and order to assist in stamping out this kind of behaviour.  Brown was prominent among those who expressed distress at the disruption of the neighbourhood, but above all he champions the cause of mutual respect and understanding:

            ‘We are citizens of the same free and happy country…We are also professed worshippers of that Saviour who forgave his enemies with his last breath.’

            He warns against the appearance of piety as opposed to the reality:

            ‘The man who cherishes an uncharitable and malignant disposition against any of his fellow-creatures, be his party or creed what it may, is unworthy of the name of a Christian; nay, more, he is a traitor to the best interests of the human race.  He may wear the cloak of a religious profession, but it is a mark of hypocrisy which the Gospel of peace rejects and disowns.’

            And he reminds us that in union there is strength:

            ‘Our dissentions, and not our enemies, have been the grand cause of all our national misfortunes.  Whilst we fought in the blindness of hatred, we have been trampled upon…yet, in spite of all, we might still retain an erect altitude as freemen, if we would honestly renounce and escape from the slavery of party and religious strife.’

            Thomas Davis, the poet of Young Ireland, concurs, remarking in his stirring account of that famous meeting in the Church of Dungannon , ‘in the cause of their country, the Irish agree.’   Whenever they did, progress followed.  

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(111)  

If it is true that for every one of us there is a niche among the building blocks of life, a role to play in the bigger picture, it would seem that Brown found his when he came to Newtownhamilton in 1833.  Almost the first thing he did was to undertake a tour of his parish, visiting all the families under his care - a rare thing in these, or indeed any other, times - and he recorded his observations about each of them.  Not unnaturally he was primarily concerned with their spiritual welfare so we find details such as no Bible;  family worship occasionally; regular attendants; but we also find significant social comment, and his notes, though brief and pertinent, are a mine of information,  revealing his deep humanity, for there is never any criticism implicit in his comments; the worst he has to say about a family is that they are ‘careless’ or ‘unfortunate’.  We learn that infant mortality was high; that often a house accommodated an extended family or even more than one family; occasionally a farm was big enough to support a servant, though this was rare; and sometimes there would be more than one religion represented in the household.  We know that there was a relatively high standard of literacy for some houses owned several religious books, and the children were ‘well-versed in their catechism’; some families are ‘interesting’, others ‘respectable’, but even the woman who has two illegitimate children is not censured.  There are occasional flashes of humour, such as ‘very seldom at meeting - husband undecided and anxious to please all parties’; and then, inevitably, there is heartbreak:

            ‘Mary Corner alias Hanaway - widow - 6 children, Mary, Jane, Rose, Nancy, Esther, Eliza - all very poor -high rent…a regular member and communicant -apparently dying.’ 

            It doesn’t require too much of an imagination to envisage the hardship experienced by a widow with no sons to help her eke out an existence in the harsh conditions of the time.

            Later when he was giving evidence to the Devon Commission^[v] and feelingly informed them, ‘I have been ten years in the parish of Newtownhamilton, and upon my first visitation of the parishioners, I noticed meat in the farmers’ houses - a pig hanging up in the chimney; but for these last two years, except in the houses of the more wealthy farmers, I have scarcely seen meal or meat; and it is evident from the deterioration of their dress, observable upon their coming out to the places of worship, that they are rapidly getting worse’, we know he was speaking from an informed sense of what life was like for the people whom he so staunchly championed.  In his comments to the commission he revealed himself to be knowledgeable about the requirements of the tenants and well-informed about their conditions.  He was unequivocal in his condemnation of the ‘middlemen’ who drove up prices and rents for their own profit; and he expounded upon the lack of lime in the area for soil improvement, the difficulty in cultivating land which is hilly and requires draining, and the problems of ‘a cold wet soil, with a substratum of slaty rock’.

            Unlike many men of the period, who held to the popular Victorian belief that suffering and poverty were evils that could be avoided through application and hard work, he readily understood that sometimes there is simply no opportunity to rise above one’s circumstances, and he tells the commissioners:  

            ‘There is a universal desire on the part of the people in that locality to work if they can get it; there is not any lazy disposition on the part of the people, but a want of employment.  On glancing at the country between this and Newtownhamilton, the marks of their industry will be seen on the sides of the hills.’

            In the course of his long life, Brown was to see many and far-reaching changes come upon his country, but none so dramatic or tragic as the great famine of the mid-1840s.  If life had been difficult before, it was ten times more harrowing now.  In an area where the land was poor to begin with, where the farmers had to wrest a living out of a terrain that was mostly scree and mountain, the soil thin and unproductive, the failure of the potato crop, the life-supporting staple that sprang from the fields they had been able to improve, was more than a body-blow.  It was a death sentence.  Brown was acknowledged to be a man of Christian action as well as theory, who quickly got involved in distributing public relief.  It is said that he often gave away the food from his table, the last coin from his pocket, the last decent garment from his cupboard; but the ravages of famine required far more than local charity to ameliorate them, and perhaps it was now, as he and other men of vision watched the grain-ships sail out from the ports of Ireland carrying a cargo that might have been used to alleviate the suffering of women and children, that the seeds of the idea that the tenant farmer must have more to sustain him than the whim of a landlord, or worse, an agent, might have been sown.  When the Land League adopted as its slogan the cry Land is Life! it was not hyperbole.  As many had found to their cost in previous decades, it was literally true.  When the Tenant Right Movement came to Armagh , Brown became one of its staunchest supporters. 

*****

(1V) 

The Tenant Right movement grew, essentially, from the shattering experiences of the Famine.  Never before had the importance of security of tenure been so forcibly driven home, and though there was some regression to violence and crime, the majority of tenants preferred to seek a peaceful solution.  A number of societies sprang up simultaneously throughout Ireland with the avowed aim of improving the lot of the small farmer, and so was laid the basis of a national movement.

            Ulster had been relatively free from the agrarian unrest of the previous century and the activities of the Whiteboys affected it not at all,^[vi] but there were murmurings of serious discontent when the so-called ‘ Ulster custom’ came under threat.  It was this custom, as well as the success of the linen industry, that had guaranteed the northern farmers a little more prosperity than their counterparts elsewhere in the country, and although it had no basis in law and was open to interpretation, it was generally recognised by landlords province-wide.  It was, in effect, the acceptance that a tenant possessed a saleable interest in his holding, and had therefore a right of occupancy.  If a tenant wished to give up his farm he could sell this right to the highest bidder, and if a landlord wished to evict a tenant, he must himself purchase that right at full market value.  This meant that the tenant could not be evicted without some compensation, nor could a landlord wait for a farmer to make improvements and then raise the rent so that he must pay, or shift.  In 1847 a County Down landlord, William Sharman Crawford, introduced a bill to legalise the custom and it was heavily defeated, but the spark was lit: in the same year the Ulster Tenant Right Association was founded by Crawford and James McKnight.  Such was the support it enjoyed from the Presbyterian clergy that the General Assembly felt compelled to petition the government for legislation.  Soon the disparate strands met and blended into the Irish Tenant League, whose avowed aim was the legalising of the Ulster custom and its extension to the whole country.

            Daniel Gunn Brown threw himself whole-heartedly into the movement, and was present on many a platform when meetings of the Tenant League were held.  The authorities tried to discredit the movement, asserting that it tolerated, even advocated, attacks on landowners, but Brown and others spoke out in defence of their pacifist stance, and consistently condemned those who resorted to violent means.  At a meeting in Armagh in 1851 his message is clear: they have a right of assembly; they have a right to protest; the farmers have a right to enjoy the fruits of their labours: startlingly liberal thinking in the context of the time.  The reporter on The Armagh Guardian paraphrases Brown’s definition of the principle of tenant right thus:          ‘…land is the natural source of wealth, and this being so, certainly the tillers of the soil are entitled to food and raiment.  The man who tilled the land had a right to be supported by the land’. 

            His insistence that it is ‘no party issue’ and that the victory they seek is a bloodless one are points he returns to again and again, so that the on-going recriminations and lack of support must indeed have weighed heavily on him.  He was often downhearted but never discouraged, and he never wavered in his belief that the government must take action to redress the wrongs whose effects he observed all around him.

            But there is no doubt that for some people the only solution seemed to be the use of force, and a Select Committee was set up in 1852 to enquire into the outrages, or murders, in the counties of Louth, Monaghan, and Armagh .  Like the Devon Commission it sought depositions from many leading public figures, among them Daniel Gunn Brown, who fearlessly maintained that while the crimes committed were wrong in themselves, yet the perpetrators were driven by an unjust system to take the law into their own hands.  Once again we are struck by how modern his vision is, in advocating that we address the causes of criminal behaviour instead of simply punishing it.  Anyone wanting an insight into the character of the man could do no better than to read the transcript of his examination by a panel of worthies, among them the Solicitor-General for Ireland .  Brown shows himself to be skilled in diplomacy, never veering from the truth, yet wary when he feels he is being led into a trap, and ready to administer a sharp set-down when he is being harried.  Almost the first question he is required to answer after giving his name and personal details is this one:

            ‘Can you give the Committee any idea as to the causes of crime in the district with which you are acquainted?’

            And his reply is uncompromising:

            ‘It appears to me to arise from the state of the law with regard to land, and the irresponsible power of landlords.’

            On one occasion he is being pressurised - today we might say being given the third degree - by Mr Solicitor-General for Ireland, and he proves himself more than a match for him.

            ‘Did you, upon that occasion speak, as you felt, severely of the conduct of landlords?

            ‘I do not think I ever spoke severely, either then or at any other time.

            ‘There are degrees of severity?

            ‘Yes, as you are well aware…

            ‘Did you on that occasion speak of landlords as exterminators?

            ‘I do not remember that I used the term; but if I had used the term, I do not think it would be contrary to the fact.’

            His evidence is fascinating for a number of reasons.  Firstly, it firmly resists any attempts to suggest that the people are naturally aggressive or violent.  Secondly, it reaffirms the commitment of all local churchmen to the cause of tenant right; and finally it most vehemently refutes the oft-heard charge that the violence in the area is inspired by religious or political motives:

            ‘Do you think that the outrages which have occurred in those districts are the result of the Ribbon^[vii] conspiracy?

            ‘I cannot say what may have been the agency employed…but I feel satisfied, in my own judgement, that they arose from the unfortunate state of the relations between landlord and tenant.’

            As a movement the tenant league lacked cohesive organisation and strong national leaders, and its aims, which were seen as a threat to the power of the landlords, were opposed by those who had influence where it mattered, both inside and outside Westminster, but its activities kept the land question alive, and finally Brown would have the satisfaction of seeing Gladstone beginning to wrestle with the thorny problem of landlord-tenant relations, and making a genuine attempt to enshrine the Ulster custom in a legal framework.  The landmark piece of legislation was the Land Act of 1870, which, though it failed to improve significantly the security of the tenant, managed to debunk the cherished idea that all the right was on the side of the landlord, and paved the way for the sweeping changes that would follow as the century drew to a close, especially the Land Act of 1881.  Though it seemed revolutionary at the time, enshrining ‘The Three F’s’ of fair rent, free sale, and fixity of tenure, it was actually building on the principle implicit in the act of 1870, that the tenant had an inalienable interest in his holding irrespective of the terms of his tenancy or the value of his improvements; and it was the recognition of this principle which fatally undermined the foundations of landlord supremacy that had endured for centuries.  

            ‘The course which he had pursued in public life, the stand which he had taken in Church Courts, the side he had espoused in educational, collegiate and politico-ecclesiastical debates, the independent position he had held in every question regardless of frown or favour, were not conducive to constitute him a popular idol.’^[viii]

            Even allowing for the partiality of the man who spoke the graveside oration at Brown’s funeral, the impression is strong of a man of independent mind who had the courage of his convictions, no matter whom they offended, as far from the popular representation of the self-seeking curate in 19^th century fiction as it is possible to be.  Ironically, we can now understand that it was probably because he was, in fact, a ‘popular idol’, that the authorities were loath to offer him advancement.  A man who is a thinker as well as a doer is apt to pose a threat to the comfortable status quo. 

            On a personal level, there emerges a picture of a benevolent patriarch, head of his household, husband, father, and mentor to the next generation.  He married Margaret Jackson on June 12^th 1838 at First Ballybay Church , and was the father of eleven children, some of whom pre-deceased him.^[ix]  Nothing is known of his wife save that she outlived him, and selected the verse that was to be used at his funeral.

            Brown continued to labour among the poor where need was greatest until 1869, when he was forced to retire through ill health, heart disease robbing him of the physical strength necessary to pursue his ministry.  His mind continued sharp and his interest in local and national affairs undiminished.  He looked forward to the day ‘when the enlightened nations of Christendom come to comprehend and to apply the sublime truths and counsels of Him who is wonderful…’^[x] 

            It is a sobering reflection on the state of humanity that we are still waiting for such a day to dawn.

            Daniel Gunn Brown died as any man might wish, surrounded by his family and in the comfort of knowing that he had striven as far as was in his power to do what is right, and help those who were unable, for a variety of reasons, to help themselves.  He enjoyed the approbation of his peers, including many clergymen of other denominations, and had the satisfaction of welcoming changes in the law which would ultimately ease the burden on the tenants who struggled against the twin vicissitudes of an unfair system and an unfriendly terrain.  His wife asked that a composition which meant much to him in his last days be read at his funeral, as he was laid to rest in Creggan churchyard in South Armagh , surrounded by the landscape which had once drawn this hymn of appreciation from his own lips:

            ‘…a country which teems with fertility, and rejoices in surpassing beauty, so that, even in the wildest and sternest features of our scenery, like those around us, there is an exquisite charm which thrills with rapture the bosom of every true Irishman, and binds him more firmly to the home of his affections.’

            Daniel Gunn Brown came home, figuratively and literally, at the end of May 1892, his cortège travelling from his home at Sandymount House, Blackrock, whither he had removed from Newtownhamilton some ten years before, to the family plot near Crossmaglen.  Many years before he had travelled that route on horseback, a much younger man, going the other way, as a visiting preacher to speak in Dundalk , so the wheel had indeed come full circle.  The Dundalk Democrat, another staunch supporter of tenants’ rights, summed up his contribution very succinctly:

            ‘…at a time when it was neither fashionable nor profitable for men in his position to give expression to the feelings of horror produced by the oppression and legalised robbery to which so many of the tenant class were subjected, he did not hesitate to do so.’

            And John MacMillan quoted the verse Mrs Brown had chosen as a comfort to both herself and her husband:

            I shine in the light of God;

            His likeness stamps my brow;

            Through the valley of death my feet have trod,

            And I reign in glory now!

            It’s not a bad way to be remembered.  

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