This article is about some Briggs families around Lisburn, and some stories printed in the late 19th century about the auctioneer and bailiff George Briggs and his ancestors.
George was well known to the Lisburn journalist and author Hugh McCall [1], and it is a reasonable inference that these stories – for example in McCall’s The Cotton Famine, and in several Lisburn Standard and Belfast press articles and obituaries – gained from direct conversation.
The gist was that a long line of Briggs worked for the Conway / Hertford estates, beginning with a Welsh soldier Ralph Briggs, who sailed to Cadiz and much later oversaw Jeremy Taylor’s accommodation at Portmore; a later Ralph (c. 1765-1855), “engaged in the estates of the Marquis of Hertford in Antrim and Down for the last 60 years”, had a special life pension by order of the fourth Marquess, Richard Seymour Conway; and George (c. 1804-1891) was (by written order) sacked for overenthusiasm after the 1863 elections, before being lauded as “"one of the oldest of the Hereford [sic] office retainers”.
This is a very large topic – early 17th century expeditions, one of the all-time champions of English prose, corrupt elections, bribery and abuse, recall of elected candidates, House of Commons committees, and the famous Stannus vs Finlay libel case. I hope that the Briggs involvement offers some interesting sidelights.
I will take them below in order of time, with the usual pinch of salt. We know Hugh McCall and his journalist colleagues could be partisan and inaccurate, and their assertions should be checked whenever possible; notoriously, newspapers printed and print unverified tales and unhistorical rubbish.
Yet I see some reason to trust him here, and some truth in the tales. He was on the spot, long involved in Lisburn’s political controversies, and a personal acquaintance of George Briggs. It is relevant, but perhaps not well known, that the Valuation Book revisions show “George Briggs” and “Hugh McCall” holding closely adjacent farms at Knockmore and Tonagh just west of Lisburn. George knew about rough politics and evictions, but cannot have been a total brute: one has to weigh the wish to speak well of the dead, but the obituaries notably praise his relations with the tenants. And it counts in McCall’s favour that, though happy to fill newspaper and book pages by recycling George’s family lore, he was a hostile witness: loud in favour of free elections, and against the assumption that land owners had inbuilt right to parliamentary power, whereas Briggs as a Hertford employee was expected to be on the other side. It depended on your point of view. The main Hertford agents, Dean James Stannus and then his son Walter Stannus, were at least patronising by modern standards, exerting strong pressure (moral and financial if not physical) to vote for the Hertford candidates and support their projects.