The role of gombeenmen in Irish history

jonniebgood1

The term gombeen refers to a role in Irish life that is sometimes forgotten with its use nowadays as an insult.

Its origin is the Irish word "gaimbín", meaning monetary interest.[1] The term referred originally to a money-lender and became associated with those shopkeepers and merchants who exploited the starving during the Irish Famine by selling much-needed food and goods on credit at ruinous interest rates

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombeen

Was it alway a derisory role?

It was a role that carried weight in society in terms of class structure. Alot of rural communities were widely influenced by the gombeenmen who could be shop keepers, buyers, loan sharks. They were compared to the worst of the landlords by some in the co-op movement.

Given that the gombeenmen were influential in rural communities, did any of them have roles of influence in the rising or war of independence? Any information or anecdotes regarding the gombeenmen and their role in Irish society is appreciated.

Jonybgud

For some reason I had always thought the Gombeens were actually a faction from the mid-Tipperary region.

paky

i would of thought the term originated in the west of ireland. i stayed in ballina last summer and came into contact with plenty of gombeen b.astards who fleeced me blind

Snickers Man

I always understood the term gombeen man to be any sort of middleman. Usually a landlord's agent, typically a local Irishman, who managed the estate for the absentee owner. He was therefore responsible for collecting rents, enforcing terms of tenancy and where appropriate enforcing rent increases and evictions.

Not a fondly remembered class of people at all.

But there will always be such middlemen in any economy or industry. Think estate agents, online ticket sellers, local representatives of multinational companies who charge way more for their products locally than their counterparts in other countries. (eg computer store owners, pharmacists etc)

CDfm

I think the term "gombeen man" is a perjorative term implying that a person is dishonest and sly and it has its origans with money lending at loan shark rates etc.

Whenever I see the term , I think of Yeats and September 1913 and think that there is a bit of snobbery about tradespeople & shopkeepers.

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/September_1913_by_William_Butler_Yeats_analysis.php

And I can imagine lots of people at the time thinking "well O'Leary is in the grave , but I have to earn a bloody living and pay the rent".

So gombeen refers to someone who dishonestly obtains money and pulls strokes -a conman.

Dionysus

Albert Reynolds and his one penny compensation, anybody?

What a retard

jonniebgood1

CDfm wrote: »

I think the term "gombeen man" is a perjorative term implying that a person is dishonest and sly and it has its origans with money lending at loan shark rates etc.

Whenever I see the term , I think of Yeats and September 1913 and think that there is a bit of snobbery about tradespeople & shopkeepers.

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/September_1913_by_William_Butler_Yeats_analysis.php

And I can imagine lots of people at the time thinking "well O'Leary is in the grave , but I have to earn a bloody living and pay the rent".

So gombeen refers to someone who dishonestly obtains money and pulls strokes -a conman.

Thats all in line with what my view would have been also. The reason for the OP though was a reference to gombeenmen from 'the transformation of Ireland' by Diarmaid Ferriter where he seems to agree with a quote from FH O'donnell of the Irish Parliamentary party who said "gombeenmen, regarded as the most respectable members of a community, were crucial in terms of the support base of Irish parliamentarians". This seems to be different than any other information about the gombeenmen. They seemed to have a bad reputation stretching back to their role in the famine.

jonniebgood1

There is a good description of gmbeenmen and the section of society they were from in 'Land and popular politics in Ireland' by Donald Jordan. It is focused on Mayo. Pg. 167.

This suggests they were an easier way to get money than a bank for ordinary people. And also that they exploited people.

CDfm

Dionysus wrote: »

Albert Reynolds and his one penny compensation, anybody?

What a retard

I thought so as the said Albert is a legend amongst dog food salesmen for opening cans and having a spoonful to demonstrate the quality of the product. He set up a factory to process dog food when canning intervention beef would have produced higher short term profits.

I can see why he took the case and why at the time it was important given the way the Irish were treated in England.

mikemac

Any chance someone can post up the article on Albert Reynolds

The link is Irish Times asking me to subscribe

aphex™

I wonder if any of the political dynasties of recent times can genuinely trace their roots to the gombeen man who collected the rent/worked for the lord? After all, they had to get started somewhere, and it was a hell of a lot harder to get started back then.

CDfm

wasnt the landlord/tenant/sub-tenancy and even sub-sub tenancy situation complex enough and i wonder if there are any stats on it

MarchDub

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

Thats all in line with what my view would have been also. The reason for the OP though was a reference to gombeenmen from 'the transformation of Ireland' by Diarmaid Ferriter where he seems to agree with a quote from FH O'donnell of the Irish Parliamentary party who said "gombeenmen, regarded as the most respectable members of a community, were crucial in terms of the support base of Irish parliamentarians". This seems to be different than any other information about the gombeenmen. They seemed to have a bad reputation stretching back to their role in the famine.

I finally dug out my copy of Ferriter - if you read the whole paragraph before your quote and after it makes more sense. Ferriter is not saying that all gombeenmen were held in respectable esteem as if they were a blameless group. Far from it. Your quote comes after another quoted deposition by Patrick Gallagher 'to a departmental committee on agricultural credit'. Concerning his own locality in Donegal Gallagher was trying to expose the extortionist behavior of the local Gombeenmen who were charging small farmers rates up to 150 percent on agricultural borrowings.

The problem - as Ferriter explains it - was so ingrained into Irish society that these gombeenmen -- according to Gallagher’s report - 'were more harmful than any bad landlord'. In poor rural areas they included just about all local "shopkeepers, producers, buyers and loan sharks". Ferriter then quotes the 1910 Historian F. H. O'Donnell whom Ferriter states "complained that not only that conventions of The United Irish League consisted of 'half goombeenmen and half political priests but that gombeenmen, regarded as the most respectable members of a community, were crucial in terms of the support base of Irish parliamentarians' " This was a complaint – a problem as it is presented by Ferriter – that the harm was widespread and bombeenism had so penetrated and been accepted into all aspects of rural, poor Irish society that gombeenmen were even in a position to give major support to the Irish Parliamentary Party.

Ferriter then goes on to state that ‘similar complaints came from figures like George Russell and Horace Plunkett’. Note that Ferriter uses the word ‘complaints’. The issue is presented by him as a problem - that all the monied classes in small poorer communities were at it and it was therefore difficult to control or eradicate.

CDfm

So the issue with gombeenmen is that they made money by providing agricultural credit ?

There seems to be a lot of speculation about how they operated ?

I read through a will from around 1915 a few years back and the guy whose will it was had lent money to others, not insignificant amounts for the time either which they used to purchase property etc. Some were former employees etc. Some of the loans were cancelled as a bequest to the borrower others were inherited by other heirs.The guy doing the lending was a retired businessman and I knew his great-grandson.

So what exactly do we know of the finance system.

MarchDub

CDfm wrote: »

So the issue with gombeenmen is that they made money by providing agricultural credit ?

There seems to be a lot of speculation about how they operated ?

So what exactly do we know of the finance system.

The gombeenmen provided loans for all kinds of situations and probably the most needed would have been loans for agricultural credit so that small farms could operate. I'm not an expert on how the banking systems worked but I know that loans to small holders or even tradesmen were not usually given by banks who only lent to the wealthier classes. Even mortgages were not commonplace until the around the 1920s which is why home ownership in urban areas was so low then.

Maybe you can check into usury laws? - I'm not sure what they were then and whether the law was in place to protect these small borrowers from extortionist rates. It's a question also whether these gombeenmen were far outside of legality.

jonniebgood1

CDfm wrote: »

So the issue with gombeenmen is that they made money by providing agricultural credit ?

There seems to be a lot of speculation about how they operated ?

I read through a will from around 1915 a few years back and the guy whose will it was had lent money to others, not insignificant amounts for the time either which they used to purchase property etc. Some were former employees etc. Some of the loans were cancelled as a bequest to the borrower others were inherited by other heirs.The guy doing the lending was a retired businessman and I knew his great-grandson.

So what exactly do we know of the finance system.

In Ulster they provided credit it seems for the purchase of 'tenant right' on land.

How did purchasers of tenant r ight acquiret hese large sums? Many simply inherited from parents or other relatives. An Irish tenant who inherited
his father's farm was inheriting, in fact, the farm's tenant right.
Other accounts mention village usurers and other informal sources of
cash for tenantr ight. More surprisinglyt, enantsv ery clearly could and
did borrow using tenant right as collateral. Several of the Devon Commission's
informants stated that tenants raised what amounted to mortgages
on their tenant right, and the commission itself concluded that
"debts are contracted on the security of the tenant right https://www.princeton.edu/rpds/papers/Guinnane_Miller_Limits_to_Land_Reform_EDCC1997.pdf pg 601

The various land acts dealt with issues in relation to finance for tenant farmers, preventing their exploitation by landlords on the face of it but presumably this reduced the need for gombeenmen as the need for this type of credit was less. They also restricted the amounts that tenants could borrow in relation to the size of their landholding.

Most modem land reforms have included expansions of rural credit facilities
with varying degrees of success. To the contrary the Land Purchase
Acts contained clauses that restricted the ability of former tenants to obtain
credit on the security of land they now owned. The 1903 act limited
mortgage debt to 10 times the annual Land Commission payment on any
holding bought with state aid https://www.princeton.edu/rpds/papers/Guinnane_Miller_Limits_to_Land_Reform_EDCC1997.pdf

There are specific examples of the accountancy aspect of land purchase under the land acts (which one?) on page 603 of the linked paper (CDfm). The gombeenmen disappeared around the begining of the 1900's so the land acts and specifically the success of the Wyndam act must have helped in conjunction with more reputable sources of finance. Did the Co-op movement have a hand in this?

CDfm

I do not know johnnie but I am very sceptical on irish historical research on several areas and lots of Irish historical writers reference earlier writers as opposed to checking the facts for themselves.

Plunkett was a fine man but was promoting a movement which was every bit political as it was social, in other words, he may have been putting a spin on it.

Even at a simpler level , what do we know of the use and history of the use of money in post famine Ireland and the development of the banking system etc.

jonniebgood1

CDfm wrote: »

I do not know johnnie but I am very sceptical on irish historical research on several areas and lots of Irish historical writers reference earlier writers as opposed to checking the facts for themselves.

Do you mean in reference to the Ferriter reference or the Paper in my last post? How can you tell that a writer is not checking the facts themselves before quoting other works?

In either case others are better able to comment on this type of historical/ historiographical writings. The Ferriter book is packed with references to various writings on the subject matters, both contemporary accounts and recorded opinions expressed at the time. I am a fan of this type of book.

The section relevent from his book is previewed here http://books.google.ie/books?id=OWS9MR_G8EoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=ferriter+transformation+of+ireland&hl=en&ei=9ykcTpzuDoWGhQf-2ZWzBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=gombeenmen&f=false (click on page 70). The introduction to the book is a great example of using references to earlier writers (see pages 3-4 for examples).

CDfm

I agree that Ferriter is a good source, but, what makes Ireland different to any other post industrial society ?

So the "gombeenman" moniker may not apply to all who lent money.

We know that ,for instance, Patrick Pearse was refused a mortgage and it is not unkind to say that he was not a good financial risk. No gombeenman there for him.



http://www.jstor.org/pss/30101320

So how can you assess these things and a historian needs to be able to look at the biases of his or her sources.

In Irish history ,particularly that written early to mid 20th century , a lot was heavily edited due to the political climate at the time and due to the simple fact that many of the parties to the events were still living and the libel laws & even the censorship laws in place at the time.

A neat little article here on how Marx was banned , Groucho that is

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/what-the-irish-censor-wouldnt-let-you-see-109486.html

So, in the Pearse's case , when the first biography appeared his mother , 2 sisters, half sister and brother and their respective families were still alive .

What makes Irish history a fun topic is that you have all these biased sources and incompletely researched books and even a good amateur historian & researcher can turn up things that are fresh and new and challenge proffesional historians.

MarchDub

CDfm wrote: »

In Irish history ,particularly that written early to mid 20th century , a lot was heavily edited due to the political climate at the time and due to the simple fact that many of the parties to the events were still living and the libel laws & even the censorship laws in place at the time.

This is true of all historical research - primary sources such as government and army reports are usually not issued until well after the events take place etc. Letters and other correspondence that surface after the death of a protagonist etc or get lost for a time. For example, one valuable source on the Tudor period only came to light in the late nineteenth century.

This is why history is usually not studied too close to the event - because there too many incomplete sources available.

CDfm wrote: »

What makes Irish history a fun topic is that you have all these biased sources and incompletely researched books .

This is also true of all historical study. The question of bias is always central to any historians work and weighing it is part of analytical training - for example, this issue is central to the study of WWII which is coming more and more into clearer focus as time goes on and more source material is discovered or released from archives. The fall of the 'Iron Curtain' brought in the Polish and Eastern European sources that had not been readily available prior to the 1990s.

CDfm

And Francie Lyons did all his work without the internet and such was the density of his work that I was able to spin out a thread based on a footnote or two on John Jinks.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056064820

I imagine he would be in awe of the internet .

CDfm

So what was the system

Photo of prisoners in Wicklow Jail, Ireland


Photo of prisoners in Wicklow Jail Musuem. Reputed to be the most haunted jail in Ireland



Debt in 19th Century Ireland - a serious offence if not repaid

Debtors in sponging houses
In 18th century Ireland before the prisons were built they put the debtors into sponging houses. These were usually the houses of the bailiffs and they charged very high rents to the prisoners who were forced to stay there. Corruption was widespread and the bailiffs made a lot of money from the misery of the prisoners locked up for the inability to pay their debts.
A City Marshalsea was built in 1798 at a cost of £2,174. It was very badly designed by Sir John Trail. It was falling down and in a bad state of disrepair within ten years. But here as in the other prisons it all depended on the amount of money the prisoner was able to pay as to how he was treated.
Considering the fact that the prisoners were in jail because they were unable to repay their debt, these men and women had now way out of their miserable existence in prison. It was a nightmare they could not escape from.
The inability to pay a debt in 19th Century Ireland was a serious offence. The system of charging for rent of cells and food meant the debt continued to rise. So for many Irish people in debt in 19th century Ireland spending the remainder of their life in prison was not uncommon


http://lmreidarticles.hubpages.com/hub/debt-in-19th-century-ireland

MarchDub

CDfm wrote: »

So what was the system

Prison for Debt - including what were termed Debtors Prisons - was common law throughout Britain and Ireland under UK law. There are many famous cases - the father of Charles Dickens for one, which is why Dickens was able to describe these prisons so well in his work.

This was slowly changed during the latter part of the nineteenth century by various Parliamentary Acts dealing with the issue of Bankruptcy.

CDfm

So "moneylending" was actually a form of investment by people as in those days the banking system was not developed.

Really, the challenge of a thread like this is to seperate out the myth of the "gombeenman" from the reality and the development of the law in respect of debtors .

CDfm

I have come accross a PhD Thesis on the internet and it covers a microfinance in Ireland in 19th century Ireland

Microfinance institutions in nineteenth century Ireland
Volume 1 of 2
By
Eoin Joseph McLaughlin, B.A.
Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Department of History
National University of Ireland
Maynooth


Link : http://eprints.nuim.ie/2266/1/e_mclaughlin_thesis.pdf

What he discusses is

Abstract
This thesis is a comprehensive study which examines the economic, social and
political ideology underpinnings of microfinance institutions in Ireland. It also
analyses the sources, uses, and consequences of microfinance for the borrower
individually and the Irish economy as a whole. The thesis studies the developments of
a number of microfinance institutions that operated in nineteenth century Ireland: loan
funds, savings banks (TSB and POSB), joint stock banks, Monts-de-Piété, Raiffeisen
banks, state-funded land purchase, and emigrant remittances. It utilises financial and
microfinancial history as a prism to analyse Irish economic and social history.
The thesis concludes by outlining four reoccurring themes that are present
throughout: legislative constraints, institutional imitation, economic versus social
goals and state intervention.

The definitions he gives definitions of micro-finance

Microfinance institutions were prevalent in nineteenth century Ireland, yet to date
they have been understudied by historians of Ireland. This thesis is a study of
microfinance institutions, and it aims to use microfinance institutions as a lens with
which to analyse Irish economic and social history in the nineteenth century.
The term microfinance was introduced into Irish historiography via the work of
Aidan Hollis and Arthur Sweetman who studied the history of Loan Fund Board
(LFB) loan fund societies1 in nineteenth century Ireland.2 This thesis is a broader and
more encompassing study of the origins and development of microfinance institutions
in nineteenth century Ireland. The study aims to enhance the scholarship of Hollis and
Sweetman, whilst contributing new discourse to the nascent literature.
Firstly, in relation to this thesis, it is important to clarify what is intended by the
term microfinance, as it was noted by The Economist that there has been considerable
confusion and disagreement regarding what actually constituted microfinance.3 For
the purposes of this thesis we shall use the definition of microfinance used by Joanna
Ledgerwood, who defined it as:

2
The provision of financial services to low-income clients, including the self-employed.
Financial services generally include savings and credit; however, some microfinance
organisations provide social intermediation services such as group formation,
development of self-confidence, and training in financial literacy and management
capabilities among members of a group. Thus, the definition of microfinance often
includes both financial intermediation and social intermediation. Microfinance is not
simply banking, it is a development tool.4
The most common activities associated with microfinance are: small loans,
informal appraisal of borrowers and investments, collateral substitutes, access to
repeat and larger loans based on repayment performance, streamlined loan
disbursement and monitoring, and secure saving products.5
Microfinance providers target low income groups of varying degrees of poverty.
The common misperception regarding microfinance is that it only targets the poorest
of the poor. This is not necessarily the case, either through accident or design. The
extent to which a microfinance institution reaches groups with very high poverty
levels is defined as the depth of their outreach capacity. But it is not always possible
to have maximum outreach depth with microfinance services. Modern experience is
that there has been a failure of many microfinance providers to include the hardcore
poor in their portfolios. Asif Dowla and Dipal Barua observed that:
Microfinance providers in Bangladesh, including Grameen Bank have been criticised for
their failure to include the hardcore poor… The low representation of the very poor in the
client base of MFIs [microfinance institutions] has been called “mission drift”. After all,
the original mission of microfinance institutions was to help the poor irrespective of the
intensity of their poverty…The poorest do not have supporting inputs such as land,
capital, additional working family members, human capital in the form of education, and
knowledge of running a business. As a result, these individuals will receive a low return
from using credit in non-farm activities, which, in turn, discourages them from
participating in a risky, low-return credit program.6
Microfinance institutions in nineteenth century Ireland were targeted towards
the ‘industrious poor’, which, by definition, excluded those whom contemporaries did
not deem to be industrious. This targeting policy brought microfinance within the
reach of different socio-economic groupings but may also have excluded the poorest
groupings.

He has a phenominal number of tables here and which cover many areas.

CDfm

So in building up an image of who the gombeenmen and their clients were you need to look around at who may have used moneylenders and for example the lowest class was the cottier

Occasionally, the priorities were reserved;
instead of working in order to gain potato-ground, laborers sometimes took potatoground
in order to be given work. The rate per acre for conacre land varied from £4 to
£12 depending upon competition and demand for land among the cottiers and
laborers. In the great majority of cases, however, the rate was £6 to £8. Actual money
was seldom involved in payment. In some cases, the competition for conacre had the
effect of driving up the rent per acre to the point where it was greater than the value
per acre of the crop grown.
The only advantage according to some of the cottiers and laborers themselves was
that, given a good crop, they grew the potatoes cheaper than if they had to purchase
them in a market. If conacre potatoes were regarded as being cheaper, it was because
the purchase of market potatoes was impossible without cash, and those who lacked
cash were forced to get credit as 25% interest from the local money lender.
The disadvantages of conacre were considerable. Not only did the renter risk losing
all through crop failure, but he also risked being exploited and defrauded by the
farmer. Even when nominally high wages were paid, the price of conacre rose
accordingly depriving the cottier or laborer or any profit he might otherwise have
made and preventing him from making any provision for the future. Conacre had a
detrimental effect upon the soil; those who took conacre were those generally least in
a position to properly tend the land, in many cases the land was exhausted through
over-cropping and lack of fertilization. The only people who profited were the
farmers whose interest in the land was not the well-being of the soil but making profit
from renting conacre to the landless cottiers and laborers. Just as they generally
charged higher rents for cabins and paid lower wages for labor, various witnesses in
contemporary reports and inquiries claim that farmers exploited the demand for
conacre to a far greater extent than did the much vilified gentry and aristocracy.
The relationship between the conacre-taker and farmer was certainly a source of
friction. Since the farmer himself was a tenant, failure to pay his own rent was
occasionally followed by "distraint", that is, the seizure of his possessions and
provisions until he paid his rent or even the same of these items for the payment of the
delinquent rent. If his farm was distrained, the conacre produce was liable to be seized
as rent by the landlord, even though the cottier or laborer might have already paid the
farmer. The conacre holder was caught in the middle and faced ruin.
Further cause for strained relationships stemmed from an 1840 Court of Common
Pleas ruling that a landlord-tenant relationship did not exist between the farmer and
conacre holders; therefore, the farmer did not have legal recourse against the conacre
holder for failure to pay his rent. As a consequence farmers demanded pre-payment or
rent or leaving the crop in the farmer's hands until payment was made. Even in the
mid 1830' conacre holders in many parts of the country were allowed to dig their
potatoes only as they paid for them; this day-to-day existence and the fact that their
conacre produce could be distrained caused great uncertainty.
Conacre hindered a solution to one of the chief problems of the period - how to deal
with an entire social class which had lost its economic reason for existence. The
"idleness of the Irish peasants", which the English considered proverbial, was not due
to choice; chronic unemployment lay at the base of the poverty and misery of
agricultural laborers. The dependence on a few months' earnings for a year's
sustenance was fraught with risk - the illness, death or injury of the laboring male
could mean starvation for the family. Contributing to this problem was the
absenteeism of the landlords based in England who not only rackrented their tenantry
but allowed the farmers to exploit the cottiers and laborers, the landed to exploit the
landless.

http://www.attymass.ie/historical_documents/famine/conacre.pdf

And in belfast

There was a tradition of humanitarianism and philanthropy in the city, but there was also the sense that political divides and the primacy of commerce in the city limited the provision of adequate welfare support for those in need. There was municipal help, including a corporation hostel for homeless men called Carrick House, but there was also periodic comment from councillors which demonstrated a lack of sympathy for those who were struggling. City councillors were recorded as remarking that misery and starvation were ‘the fault of the parties themselves’.

Keeping a family going in such circumstances was no simple task. Food was bought from hawkers carts which passed through the streets in the evening, selling cockles and mussels, or cheap imported meat. It says something for the subsistence level of existence for many in Belfast that there were more than 100 pawnbrokers in the city in 1911. Moneylenders also operated, charging 15 per cent interest. If everything else failed the Belfast Union Workhouse was the place of last resort. Belfast had the lowest pauper rate in the United Kingdom, not least due to the minimalist approach taken by the municipal authorities towards providing relief

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/exhibition/belfast/social_conditions.html

and social mobility take the jewish community shows that small businesses often needed to provide credit to survive

In 1880, Dublin's Jewish community numbered 450 and were mostly quite prosperous. In 1900, Dublin had more than 3,000 Jews with smaller numbers living in Cork, Belfast, Limerick, Waterford and Londonderry. Lithuanian Jews began arriving in 1881. Many became peddlers, petty traders and moneylenders "credit drapers and "weekly men" in the local parlance, according to Alan Tigey.
Some of these immigrants got their "five pound stake" from the Hebrew Philanthropic Loan Society. The second generation moved up the occupational ladder, as Jews became a major force in the manufacture of clothing and furniture.

And how it was done and where the gombeenman fitted

Pawnbrokers could also legally grant loans at interest. There were 477 of them registered in 1849. The legal rate they were allowed to charge was one halfpenny on two shillings per month that is five shillings in the pound simple interest per annum or 25%. (This is not very different from the interest now charged by credit card companies.) However, as the loans might be outstanding for a considerable time an annual rate of 40% might be nearer the mark in practice. Unregistered moneylenders or gombeen men (from Latin cambium exchange) charged what they liked. An example of a shilling in the pound per week (about 520% simple interest or 1,200% compound interest per annum) was quoted in the Evening Packet (4 August 1842). It is reasonable to conclude from what occurs in primitive societies that the cottier class as a whole was heavily in debt to the moneylenders. Weddings and funerals always needed an outlay of cash and it was unthinkable not to spend it. Despite the nominal exorbitant rate of interest it is unlikely that the moneylenders ever expected repayment or wished for it. The actual return to the moneylender would probably have been much less in most cases than what was demanded, but we have no way of calculating it It was better to have a permanent first claim on any income of the borrower. It is for this reason that taking interest on non-productive loans has always been denounced as usury.



http://www.deskeenan.com/4PrChapter7.htm

so the gombeenman was an unlicenced moneylender in the undeveloped economy.

I have found some jewish history which shows the emerging economic development .

Now a poor peddlar selling goods on credit might aspire to be a licenced moneylender and he or his children might aspire to get out of the business because it was a hard life

2.1. Peddling and all that
The historian of Irish Jewry, Louis Hyman, claimed that the post-1880 immigrants '[knew]
no trade but peddling'. Hannah Berman likened peddling in Lithuania to ‘selling a kopek’s worth of
needles and earn[ing] half a groschen, and at the same time, hav[ing] to swallow a rouble’s worth of
insults’. Myer Wigoder, who traveled in Dublin with 'slippers, pictures, picture frames and drapery',
8
had dealt successively in groceries, wine, leather, and corn in Lithuania and in 'jewellery and smallware'
in Amsterdam. Halitvak of the Jewish Chronicle noted how the men of ‘Okmyan’, whence
several of Ireland’s Litvaks came, had ever been ‘wanderers’:
It was characteristic of that town that for the greater part of the year it was left in the
occupation of women and children, the men being away to all parts of the country,
sometimes the farthest parts of the Empire, following their vocations as ‘Landkremers’
(peddlers) and only coming home for the principal holidays at the end of each season in
the year.
Hannah Berman wrote of her father:
His brewery having failed him, father resorted to the usual means of livelihood
common to the place – peddling. He made up a huge pack of pieces of linen, sewingcotton,
needles, scissors, cereals and seeds, and let himself go along the thinly-populated
countryside, in all weathers – in the rigorous winter, the torrential spring, when the
roads were slippery with ice or deep in slush; and in the heat of the summer, when the
dust lay knee-deep on the rough cart-tracks between the villages. Like all those who
betook themselves to the roads with packs, he was kept going not by an even moderate
measure of success but his unquenchable Jewish optimism. Who knew if, at the turn of
the long road, or tomorrow, or next day, a stroke of dazzling good luck would not fall
his way?
The central role played by peddling and credit in the early decades in Ireland is undeniable.
According to Hannah Berman, the newcomers ‘were almost without exception, weekly payment
drapers, or as they were generally called, shilling-a-week men’. Stanley Price, grandson of a
Lithuanian-born peddler of religious objects, corroborates: ‘The common pattern was for…those
with little money to become peddlers’. Israeli President Chaim Herzog remembered that in the
Dublin of his youth (in the 1920s) ‘the community had the usual mix of gevirim (prosperous
businessmen), intellectuals – who were regarded askance – and the rest of the community, who went
about their business of peddling and moneylending’ (Berman 195-a; Price 2002; JC, 29 May 1992).
There is a lot of statistical support too – in the census, in naturalization files, in police reports – for
the importance of peddlers and credit drapers in the pre-WWI period.
Peddling suited the immigrants in several ways. As members of a 'middleman minority'7
many of them had the experience; it required relatively little start-up capital (which was usually
forthcoming from within the community when needed); and it required no more than a rudimentary
knowledge of English. When Jacob Elyan’s grandfather arrived in Cork in 1881, other Litvaks
taught him a few words of English, which ‘he wrote it down in Hebrew translation’. They then told
7 On the economics and sociology of middleman minorities see Bonacich and Modell (1980); Bowles and
Gintis (2004).
9
him to ‘go out and make a living for yourself’. Similarly his boss taught the fictional Moses
Levenstein a few phrases of English and the words for his stock in trade, which Moses thought he
could learn in an hour. But so nervous was he on his first outing that he blurted ‘Gut morning, do
you vant blankets, quilts, seets, sorts, sawls, how is your husband?’ all in one breath. Leiba Berman,
who could also barely speak English, devised an ingenious way of ordering goods from his Dublin
suppliers. He would enlist the help of a few country schoolchildren to whom he would patiently
explain his requirements. They then would write them down in the form of a crude letter,
stipulating the right railway station and sending payment in two separate mailings, each containing
halves of torn pound notes.
And a final but crucial factor is that there was a demand for the peddlers' services. Jewish
traders performed exactly the same function in parts of Britain at this time, but peddling was, in
relative terms, much more important in Ireland. For those with the skills and resourcefulness of the
Litvaks, the very economic backwardness of Ireland may have helped. This may also explain,
paradoxically, why Dublin was a more important destination for the immigrants than booming
Belfast. Myer Wigoder found that while some unscrupulous customers took advantage of him in
the poorer districts, 'it was very difficult to find customers in the better districts' (Wigoder 1935: 48).
There was scope in Ireland for the small number who settled there to make a living and, indeed, to
prosper. The trade in holy pictures was an inspired choice, both because the interiors of Irish
Catholic homes at the time were lined with them, and because this trade led to trade in other items.
In the cities the peddlers’ clients were mostly women of the poorer classes. Typically
repayments were made in weekly installments (hence ‘weekly men’). The range of goods traded
included items of clothing, framed holy pictures, slippers, ribbons and thread, sheets, tablecloths,
tea, and so on. All were carried in appropriate backpacks. The peddler-drapers relied on wholesale
drapers (dubbed wholesalenics), of whom there were several, for their supplies. In Joseph Edelstein’s
detailed account:8
Mr. Greenblatt told Moses that he would begin on Tuesday next by travelling
with a pack; that he would have to go to Mr. Schorstein in Lombard Street and get from
him four blankets at 4s 3d; four undersheets at 10½d; two shawls at 6s 6d; six pair
sheets at 1s 4d; six petticoats at 1s 5½d; four table sheets at 1s 2d; two ‘ladies’ skirts at
4s 4d; that he should note down all he got; and that on Tuesday morning he would take
the pack containing these articles, neatly folded, and place it on his back; and hold one
end of the strap, which would be wound round the leather, in his right hand; and he
would buy a penny pocket-book and go out to travel, and would knock at each house
and ask the residents if they required skirts, blankets, quilts, shawls, petticoats, sheets,
boots, suits, and everything in the drapery line.
8 240d=20s=£1=US$4.86.
10
In aggregate, the goods in a backpack might thus fetch £5 or £6 (or $25-$30). The weekly payments
involved were small, typically a shilling a week. So common was this calling that it paid one
immigrant to print special cards for the ‘weekly men’.
There is no obvious way of knowing how much the typical weekly man earned. Leiba Berman,
who relied on family connections both for his passage to Ireland and the capital that started him off
as a peddler, had made enough after ‘about eighteen months’ in business to send for his wife and
children in Lithuania. The fictional Moses Levenstein began as a traveller for Chaim Greenblatt in
November 1899 at the modest weekly wage of fifteen shillings, out of which he paid 6s 6d for
‘board, lodging, and washing’. On his first day in the city’s Liberties he made five sales. Within a
year he was drawing £2 12s weekly in return for collecting a weekly £8 10s for Greenblatt. On
Christmas Eve 1900 he bought out his employer for £85, which Greenblatt deemed a fair price for
outstanding business of £364, after allowing £100 for bad debt and £100 for the effort of collecting
the remainder. After some haggling, Moses, who possessed £45 in cash, agreed to pay £40
immediately, and to sign promissory notes for two later payments of £25 and £20. Moses
Levenstein, who had arrived in Ireland with only 1s 4d, prospered thereafter. If he and Greenblatt
were at all representative – and the prices and initial wage level cited by Edelstein are realistic
enough – then their form of peddling on the instalment system, though hard work, was indeed a
lucrative one. Levenstein’s wages just before he bought out Greenblatt were more than double the
weekly wages of the average unskilled Dublin labourer.
At the outset all the major Jewish moneylenders hailed from the ‘English’ community.
However, some weekly men, like Moses Levenstein, soon graduated to money-lending, and the
machers among the first generation of Litvak immigrants were mostly moneylenders. Becoming a
‘percentnic’ was a step upwards from peddling dry goods on one’s own account, but the 'percentnic' also
relied on weekly repayments. In the 1900s several operated under names like The Union Loan Bank
or The Private Loan Bank in special business premises, but most operated from their own homes.9
Some paid a commission to canvassers or local shopkeepers who identified or introduced reliable
borrowers. Typically these Jewish moneylenders, like their non-Jewish counterparts, exacted
promissory notes from borrowers. Thus a loan of £10 might involve the borrower receiving £7 10s
in cash, in return for a promise to pay twenty weekly installments of 10s.
In the absence of business records, some sense of the moneylenders’ and credit drapers'
clientele and the typical sums involved may be obtained from the records of civil bill cases in the
Dublin circuit court. The court offered traders a quick and inexpensive, if very public, means of
9 In a confidential memo in the early 1900s the Dublin Metropolitan Police listed forty-six Jewish licensed
moneylenders in Dublin. They represented a significant fraction of the fewer than two hundred registered in
the country as a whole at the end of 1902 (National Archives (Dublin), Chief Secretary’s Office Registered
papers (CSORP) 1905/23538; Moore 1984).
11
enforcing contracts. Table 1 below focuses on the 1910-14 period, when over 500 defendants faced
over thirty different Irish-based Jewish plaintiffs. Most cases concerned dishonored promissory
notes. The average value of the sum claimed on the eve of the First World War was £6 (or eight
times an unskilled Dublin worker’s weekly wage). However, differences in the average size of
transaction between individual lenders are also discernible.
Older residents of the SCR area remember the last of the Jewish peddlers doing their rounds
on foot. The last of the Jewish credit drapers ceased business in the 1970s; there are only one or
two Jewish petty moneylenders left. Not many of the weekly men’s sons followed in their fathers’
footsteps. For the most part, the sons and grandsons of the immigrants thus graduated to owning
their own clothing factories and to the professions, especially law and medicine. Had Chaim
Herzog, future president of Israel, remained in Dublin, ‘like many boys in the Jewish community, I
would undoubtedly have studied medicine’.
Moneylenders were unloved in nineteenth-century Ireland. It seems reasonable to suppose
that as the migrants assimilated, the psychic costs of petty moneylending grew and the ‘weekly’
business -- serviceable while the newcomers were gaining an economic foothold -- came to be
regarded as disagreeable. A retired weekly man, one of Dublin’s last in the business, gave the author
three reasons for the decline of the business: a preference for white-collar professions, the decline
in the size of the community, and the fact that those engaged in the trade ‘did not like it’. Another
elderly retired Jewish businessman described selling off the money-lending business he had inherited
from his father-in-law, having no stomach for it himself.
The role of domestic service in nineteenth-century Irish-America offers an analogy. An
occupation widely frowned upon by both Yankee women and first generation Irish-American
women, it seems to have been the occupation of choice of Irish immigrant women. The stigma
which deterred others from service did not apply. Irishwomen therefore paid a lower psychic
price for the higher wages and safer work environment that domestic service conferred.
Even in the early days some in the Jewish community had misgivings about moneylending.
Jessie Bloom claimed that her father ‘might have fared better in the 'weekly payment'
business, but the idea of taking a shilling a week from poor Irish people who were hardly able to
pay it repelled him’. Twice the visiting Chief Rabbi raised the issue, cautioning in 1892 against
‘anything that could conduce to the hurt and harm of your fellow-citizens, and by being
scrupulously fair and honest in your dealings with them’. He returned to this theme in 1898, and
in Limerick his counsel provoked a split in Limerick's Jewish community. Later Dublin-born
Geoffrey Wigoder, editor of the Dictionary of Jewish Biography and the New Standard Jewish
12
Encyclopedia, mused whether ‘the frequent obligation to meet weekly payments owed to Jewish
pawnbrokers and moneylenders did not help the Jewish image’ (Wigoder 1985).
Besides peddling, what else? In my 1911 Dublin database only one Jewish male is described
as a 'labourer'. The poorest men in the Jewish community – including recent arrivals, the so-called
‘greeners’ -- found work as tailors, cap-pressers, cabinetmakers, brushmakers, shoemakers, glaziers,
shoe-repairers, collectors of rags or old furniture, 'marine store dealers', or as machinists in clothing
sweatshops. Some remained in these jobs all their lives. Dublin for a time boasted a small Jewish
Tailors and Pressers Union, which met in a building also housing a shul, and represented workers
employed by Jewish factory owners.
TABLE 1. AVERAGE SIZE OF LOANS MADE BY JEWISH MONEYLENDERS AND TRADERS, c.
1910-14
Name Trading as Address Avg. (£) Med. (£) N
Julius Goodman Brunswick Loan Bank 57 Gt. Brunswick St. 5.5 6.0 12
Simon Watchman Union Loan & Discount Bank 5.6 4.0 59
Julius Solomon Dublin Loan & Discount Bank 4 Fleet St. 5.9 5.5 36
Michael Mofsovitz National Loan & Discount Bank 43 Dawson St. 5.7 6.0 21
Oscar White 17 Victoria St. 6.8 6.2 20
Moses Grinspun 42 Synge St. 5.5 5.5 1
William Allaun Trading as Jas C. Walshe 15 Anglesea St. 8.3 8.3 2
Abraham Briscoe 9 Adelaide Road 8.5 8.5 2
Jacob Barron Clothier 14 Harcourt Road 2.2 2.7 7
Hoseas Weiner House furnisher 33 Talbot St. 4.1 3.5 6
Peter/Lewis Cohen Diamond Coal Co. 2.4 2.2 15
Abraham Elkinson 26 Victoria St. 3.7 3.1 7
Arthur Newman The City Tailors 4 South Frederick St. 3.5 3.0 41
Simon Watchman Talbot Furnishing Co./Watson & Co. 7.0 5.8 18
Benj. Rosenberg Celtic Tailoring Co./Bernard & Co. 2.2 2.3 11
Bernard Glick 3 Wolseley St. 5.0 5.0 5
Hyman Barron Munster Furnishing Co. 24 Lr. Camden St. 7.9 5.6 57
Joseph Hesselberg Dublin Furnishing Co. 7.6 4.8 5
Joseph Levitt Eclipse Furnishing Co. 6 Lr. Ormond Quay 5.9 5.8 16
Louis Levitt 4.3 3.8 9
Louis Lewis Tailor 28a Wellington Quay 3.6 3.0 9
Mau. and Jos. Block Block Bros. 5.6 5.0 5
Morris Newman People’s Own Tailors 8 Eustace St. 3.3 3.5 5
Samuel Isaacson British & Irish Furnishing Co. 169 Gr. Brunswick St. 21.6 21.6 2
Solomon Sevitt 21 Greenville Tce. 2.9 2.9 2
Solomon Ginsberg Irish House for Tailoring 2.2 2.1 8
Louis Orlik 2.0 2.0 2
Joseph Isaacson B. Hyam 28 Dame Street 4.5 3.8 3
H. Weiner/J. Lipson House furnishers 33 Talbot St. 2.7 2.7 2
Abraham Barron 21 Wolseley St. 7.6

http://www.econ.barnard.columbia.edu/~econhist/papers/COgrada.pdf

So a picture is begining to emerge of a changing society where those involved in money lending did so as part of a business.

The economics of lending small amounts and collecting even smaller repayments door to door may explain the interest rate in part.

So the term "gombeenman" or unlicenced moneylender to the poor underclass may be blown out of proportion and it may actually be overused.

CDfm

mikemac wrote: »

The schoolmaster confronts him

"You're a lier, a cheat and a user, you talk about brotherly love (they have a secret Fenian group) while you rob Irish people blind"
"You talk about the redress of grievances when it's you the people are aggrieved with"

They discuss shooting the Landlords agent and the gombeen shopkeepers says:
"Because the British aristocracy are to blame for it all and I will be here to dance on their grave and I will be here to buy up their land"
"A landlord? And what kind of landlord will you be?"
"An Irish one"
"English, Irish, still a landlord" the schoolmaster sneered

To be honest the Landlords agent was an honorable man, an outsider doing his job though it was desperate to see people being evicted

But that is fiction not history and there are lots of memoirs from the period and lots of landlords agents were in business for themselves.

At a very simply level it is not really accurate and would it not be something like you had Landlords , Agents, Tenants, Sub-tenants, Cottiers,Labourers & Workhouse Inmate. So some of these from Agents down could be Irish. The Land Acts did away with a lot of this but not all.

Where I come from the phrase "she comes from a cottage out the road" was a put down for someone putting on heirs.

And agents have left memoirs

http://www.quinnipiac.edu/other/abl/etext/irish/reminiscences/reminiscences.html

And 1 from the North

http://www.craigavonhistoricalsociety.org.uk/rev/redmondmemories2.html

And here the famous Trench Memoirs ( some say Walker Texas Ranger is based on this)

http://eprints.nuim.ie/1325/1/PDuffyShirley.pdf

http://books.google.com/books/about/Realities_of_Irish_life.html?id=fEQ9AAAAIAAJ

It seems the truth of the "gombeen" is a very different arrangement to a shopkeeper giving credit and whose limited capital was tied up in the credit given to customers.It is closer to the truth to say they were borrowing themselves or relying on patronage to stay in business. And the investment returns in Ireland were smaller than in the North or the UK .

We also know that area's like peddling and weekly men on credit were difficult door to door sales jobs. They were competitive and contributed to the Limerick "pogrom" for instance as the goods and prices from the Foreign/Jewish Peddlar were better than the Irish Peddlar.

It seems very difficult to nail down who these gombeeenmen/moneylenders were but what we can say is they operated at the lower end of the chain where people did not have access to other sources of money.