Hussey, Samuel Murray

by C. J. Woods

Hussey, Samuel Murray (1824–1913), land agent, was born at Bath, Somerset, on 17 December 1824, the fifth son in the family of five sons and four daughters of Peter Bodkin Hussey of Farrinakilla, near Dingle, Co. Kerry, and his wife Mary (d. 1857), daughter of Robert Hickson of the Grove, near Dingle, DL of Co. Kerry. Peter Bodkin Hussey (1778–1838?), a barrister practising in Dublin, inherited property from an elder brother and in 1807 was a member of the Catholic Committee; his sister, Clarissa Hussey (1780–1864), owned much property including one of the Blasket Islands. Samuel Murray Hussey and his siblings were brought up as protestants like their mother; Samuel attended Huddard's school in Dublin, Hogg's in Limerick, and then in England at schools in Exeter and Woolwich. At seventeen he went to Scotland, to a farm in Berwickshire, to learn about agriculture; he was later to make two agricultural tours of Scotland.

He returned to Ireland (1843) to farm in Kerry on the model he had learnt, but found it impossible to do so on the 60 acres he obtained near Dingle and so moved to Inniscarra, Co. Cork, to become an assistant to Sir Peter Fitzgerald (qv), knight of Kerry, who was married to his sister Julia, and land agent to Sir George Colthurst. His next position was government inspector of land improvements and drainage works (1846). As such he saw much of the famine around Bantry. He succeeded in 1850 as agent and managed Colthurst's estate at Ballyvourney, which then had a rental of over £4,600. By 1880 £30,000 had been spent on improvements, over 100 houses slated and nearly 400 acres planted – Hussey was ‘a passionate lover of trees’ (Hall). He was agent also to Lord Kenmare's estates (over 118,000 acres) in Kerry, Cork and Limerick. By the early 1880s, Hussey headed a land agency firm said to supervise 88 estates with over 3,000 farming tenants and to collect rents to the value of quarter of a million sterling. In 1879 he purchased for £80,000 the Harenc estate in north Kerry but lost one third of it under Gladstone's second land act (1881). The rents on the Colthurst estate were reduced to £3,600 under the same act.

Hussey was the bête noire of the Land Leaguers in Cork and Kerry. Threats were made against him and members of his family; he carried a revolver and constables guarded his house, Edenburn, Gortatlea, in the parish of Ballymacelligott, described by one visitor as a leafy oasis amid an ‘abomination of desolation’ (Hall). On 28 November 1884 a dynamite explosion occurred at the house, after which Hussey, concerned for his family's safety, took them to live in London, where he was a member of the Carlton Club. He stood for parliament as a Tory at Tralee (1880) and got 133 votes but was defeated by a home-ruler, the O'Donoghue (qv), who got 187. Hussey's Reminiscences (1904) contains insights into the Famine, Fenians, and Land League as well as the work of a land agent. He was a fierce critic of Gladstone, ‘at whose grave may be laid’, he asserted, ‘every calamity which has affected Ireland since it had the misfortune to arouse his interest’ (ibid., 60). Samuel Murray Hussey died 10 November 1913 at his home Aghadoe House, near Killarney, and was described in an obituary in The Times as ‘one of the best known land agents in the United Kingdom’.

He married (30 August 1853) a first-cousin, Julia Agnes Hickson, third daughter of his mother's eldest brother, John Hickson of the Grove, sovereign of Dingle, and his wife Barbara (née Mahony), and with her had two sons and five daughters. The elder son, John Edward Hussey (1856–1905), was also a land agent.