Boycott Hooliganism | 2422

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Boycott Hooliganism

I’ve recently been reading Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen by Greg Jenner. It’s a great book and covers a lot of ground between fame and celebrity, why the latter only emerged in the early 18th century. 

The book has got me thinking about a different kind of fame. When someone’s deeds and actions are so impactful that their name echoes through history and becomes part of everyday language. Not celebrity, but eponymity. A strange kind of immortality, where a person’s legacy outlives them in the form of language itself.

Draco of Athens, around 600 BC, gave us ‘draconian,’ meaning unforgiving rules, from his legal code. And King Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose costly victories gave rise to the term ‘Pyrrhic victory’—a win so devastating it’s almost like defeat.

In more recent times, there’s people like John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, Étienne de Silhouette, Louis Pasteur, Henry Shrapnel. Or Jean Nicot, who introduced tobacco to France in the 16th century. The list goes on.

Patrick Hooligan sounds like a made up name, but he was a real person too. 

Originally named Houlihan, Patrick was an Irishman who emigrated with his family from the Limerick area to London, settling in Southwark, some time around the 1850’s. 

There he worked as a bouncer and soon gained notoriety as a petty criminal, leading a gang involved in street muggings, vandalism, and fights. The gang’s base was a pub located on Borough High Street. Originally called the Coopers Arms it was locally known as The Bucket of Blood – which is an incredible name for a pub. So named after the brutal, bare-knuckle fights that used to take place there. Later in the 1870’s ,Hooligan was imprisoned for killing a policeman during a street fight – dying inside.

But, by the turn of the century “Hooliganism” had entered the English language. Just as we use it today, to describe reckless and violent behaviour. Authors like Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells and Dickens all used the term in their writings.

There’s another word connected to the Irish, and the main one that I want to tell you about today – mostly as I fell down a wikipedia rabbit hole about it this week and need to tell someone. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The term “Boycott” comes from the life of one Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott. An English land agent in 19th-century Ireland. 

First a little context. In the 1870s, Irish tenant farmers as part of a broader struggle for land reform had begun forming associations to demand the Three Fs’. “Fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale” in the face of oppressive rents and frequent evictions from English landowners. In 1879 the Irish National Land League was formed to agitate for the three demands.

The Land League was deeply influential from its very founding. One of its founders Charles Stewart Parnell was elected leader of the Home Rule Party just a year later. Parnell is most famous for a speech laying out the tactics of contemporary cancel culture: social ostracism. 

Parnell advised, “When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must shun him… as if he were the leper of old.” And this strategy of isolating those who broke community solidarity—whether they were landlords, their agents, or even neighbours—was soon tested on Captain Boycott.

Boycott was the land agent for Lord Erne, a wealthy landowner in County Mayo. Taking up the job after his retirement from the British Army in 1854. In 1880, after a poor harvest, buoyed by support from The Land League, local tenants demanded a 25 percent reduction in rent. When Boycott refused and issued eviction notices, the community fought back. Local women threw stones, mud, and manure at the process server and police, successfully driving them away. Word spread quickly, and soon Boycott’s labourers, servants, and local businesses, all abandoned him, leaving him isolated. Even Boycott’s nephew, who attempted to deliver his mail, was warned that he would face danger if he continued.

Boycott was now the target of a full-scale social and economic exclusion campaign. No one would work for him, sell to him, or even speak to him. He was forced to import food and provisions by boat from the nearby town of Cong.

Desperate to save his crops and execute his responsibilities as the land agent, Boycott appealed to the British press. Which, never having met a working class struggle they didn’t despise, were able to mobilise government support for the captain. Boycott brought in loyalist workers under British military protection. But the cost of the operation was far more than the crops were worth, resulting in the London press turning on Boycott too declaring a waste of public funds.

Ultimately, humiliated, Boycott was forced to leave Ireland in disgrace. 

This act of social and economic ostracism was so effective that Boycott’s name became a verb in his own lifetime—forever linking him to public rejection.

His name was first used by the Irish to describe the actions of the Farmers, then only a few months later, the Birmingham Daily Post used the word in connection to a worker boycott of a local Ballinrobe merchant. Just 8 years later in 1888 it was included in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The Captain didn’t die till 1897!

One day you’re collecting rent, the next day your name’s forever linked to defeat, rejection, and public shame.

Sounds good to me.