CHARLES BIANCONI, THE IRISH CAR-MAN.
THE life of a self-made man is at all times a deeply interesting study.
We like to see how he mastered surrounding circumstances, with what
bravery he met adverse fate, and how he fared when he had triumphed and
become strong. Such a man is not always a model to be held up for
admiration. Often there is a hardness and coarseness about him which is
undesirable, and an assumption of greatness on account of pecuniary
success, which, in good society at any rate, will be resented. When the
late Mr. Peabody was honoured with a statue under the shadow of the Royal
Exchange, and within the heart of the City, it was said by some
ill-natured Yankee, that if England wished to erect statues to such men,
there were plenty of rich men America could supply us with for that
purpose; and certainly it is not in the true interests of humanity that
we should get into the habit of paying too much homage to worshippers of
the Golden Calf. Undoubtedly it will be much to be deprecated if that be
the worship of the future; but it is a danger in these levelling days,
when democracy is coming more and more to the front, against which the
preacher and the moralist must ever guard the nation. At all times the
tone of public thought must be pitched low, and when rank has lost its
_prestige_, the danger of being swamped by vulgar plutocrats is immensely
increased. As was to be expected, Mrs. O’Connell is very proud of her
father, and, as was also to be expected, the father was very proud of
himself. He was a very illiterate man. He even could not spell the word
money properly; but no man knew better what it meant, and no man could
have ever anticipated that he would have secured so much of it as he did.
As a boy he had the reputation of being stupid, and also wild; and it
seems to have been with the view of getting rid of him that his father
sent him from his home in the Lombard Highlands, in company with one
Andrea Faroni, to England, where he was to learn to become a dealer in
prints, barometers, and eye-glasses. It was a fortunate thing for
Charles Bianconi that Favoni brought him instead to Ireland. In
London—the great cold world of London—it would have fared hard with the
poor Italian lad. In Dublin and the country round, the good-looking
foreigner, with his bright eyes and his civil tongue, met with a warm
reception—a reception all the more warm, inasmuch as he was of the Irish
faith; but even then it is strange how he prospered as he did. Without
knowing a word of the language, and with fourpence in his pocket to pay
expenses, he was sent out into the country on the Monday morning with two
pounds’ worth of prints to sell, and with the understanding that he was
to be back by Saturday night; but the lad had made up his mind to be a
somebody, and he was as good as his word; and he had not been long in
Ireland before he hit on the idea which led him to fame and fortune.
One of his first lessons in Ireland was, he tells us, the great
difference between the pedlar doomed to tramp on foot, and his more
fortunate fellow who could post or ride on horseback. When he became a
small shopkeeper at Carrick, the need of equestrian conveyance was
brought home to him in a still more forcible manner. “I supplied,” he
writes, “my Carrick shop with gold-leaf from Waterford, going down in Tom
Mahony’s boat to buy it. Carrick-on-Suir is twelve or thirteen miles
from Waterford by land, but the windings of the river make it twenty-four
by water. This boat, then, was the only public conveyance. The time of
its departure had to depend upon the tide, and it took four or five hours
to make the journey.” One day, going to Waterford by the boat, Bianconi
got sodden with the wet, and was laid up with cold and pleurisy for a
couple of months. This Irish experience was putting him in the right
track; and in 1815, when good horses were to be had cheap, in consequence
of the peace, he had the courage to start his cars, running at first
between Carrick and Clonmel, a distance of some twelve miles. At first
Bianconi only contemplated carrying the poorer people. There was the
aristocratic mail-coach for the people of quality; but greatness was
thrust upon him. In 1830 he carried the mails direct from the
post-office, and had bought up some leading coaching lines. In his
latter years he had 1,400 horses at work, and daily covered 3,800 miles.
Still further, to give the reader an idea of the extent of his business,
we may note there were 140 stations for the change of horses, and that
these latter consumed from 3,000 to 4,000 tons of hay, and from 30,000 to
40,000 barrels of oats annually. In England Bianconi could never have
made his fortune in this way. In Ireland he appeared at the right time,
and was the right man in the right place.
As a benefactor to Ireland it is almost impossible to overestimate
Bianconi’s usefulness. The farmer who formerly drove spent three days in
making his market; when the cars came into operation one day was
sufficient, thereby saving two clear days and expense of his horse.
Another good object gained was the opening up the resources of the
interior of the country. And lastly, there was the civilising effects of
the intercommunion created among classes of the country, by means of
travelling together on one or other of the Bianconi cars. The way in
which the system was organised ensured its success, “I take my drivers,”
said Mr. Bianconi at the Cork meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, “from the lowest grade of the establishment.
They are progressively advanced, according to their respective merits, as
opportunity offers, and they know that nothing can deprive them of these
rewards, and also of a pension of their full wages in cases of old age or
accident, unless it be their own wilful and improper conduct.” The whole
establishment must have had a beneficial influence over a large area.
Any man found guilty of uttering a falsehood, however venial, was
instantly dismissed, and this consequently insured truth, accuracy, and
punctuality. It must be remembered, too, at the time in which Mr.
Bianconi commenced his career, the county of Tipperary was much
disorganised, owing to the maladministration of the laws, and to the
almost total severance of the bond which ought to have united the upper
and humble classes of society. At that time the Catholics were generally
looked down upon as beings of an inferior race. A Catholic was not
permitted to buy or become possessed of land. In his very short
autobiography, Mr. Bianconi thus describes the grievances of the Roman
Catholics:—
“One of the injustices of which the Catholics used to tell me, was
the unfair way in which the Catholics were treated in Clonmel.
Amongst others, they relate a practice then in existence. The
Protestant shopkeepers, upon a certain day, used to go about the town
levying a tax upon their Catholic neighbours who attempted to open
shops within the town walls of Clonmel. They used to wring from each
individual from two to four guineas, which they called intrusion
money. My informants especially praised an old Mrs. Ryan, now dead,
who boldly refused to comply with their demands. The tax-makers,
therefore, seized her goods. She afterwards recovered them at law,
and her spirited conduct led to the abolition of this toll. We
Catholics had at one time to pay a tax upon all bought merchandise,
while our more favoured Protestant and Dissenting fellow-townsmen
were saved not only from a needless expenditure, but from the galling
contact with such a class as the toll-gatherers. In the house, 112,
Main Street, was the news-room, which I joined. I was greatly struck
by the loud and consequential talk constantly going on between a Mr.
Jephson and a Sir Richard Jones, and two more of their set, whereas I
and my fellow-Papists were not allowed to speak above a whisper.
This I resolved not to submit to; for I could see no reason why, when
I had paid my money in a public place, I should not share all equal
rights. Others followed my example; and as we all, Protestants and
Papists, indulged in equally noisy declamation, a stranger entering
our news-room would have been puzzled to say which party were the
privileged administrators of the penal code.”
Irish like, Mr. Bianconi managed now and then to have his joke. One day,
when he was sending home in a large wooden case a very superior
looking-glass, an old lady asked what was in the box thus carefully
conveyed. “The Repeal of the Union,” was Bianconi’s reply. The old
woman’s delight and astonishment knew no bounds. She knelt down on her
knees in the middle of the road, to thank God for having preserved her so
long, that at last, in her old days, she should have seen the Repeal of
the Union. As another illustration, we quote the story of the opposition
car:—
“His first attempt he thought was going to be a failure; scarcely
anybody went by car. People were used to trudging along on foot, and
they continued to do, thus saving their money, which was more
valuable than their time. Another man would have abandoned the
speculation; but Mr. Bianconi did nothing of the kind. He started an
opposition car, at a cheaper rate, which was not known to be his—not
even by the rival drivers, who raced against each other for the
foremost place. The excitement of the contest, the cheapness of the
fare, the occasional free lifts given to passengers, soon began to
attract a paying public, and before very long both the cars every day
came in full. He had bought a great, strong, yellow horse, as he
called him, to run in the opposition car; he gave, he said, £20 for
the animal. One evening his own recognised driver came to him in
great pride and excitement. ‘You know the great, big, yallah horse
under the opposition car? Well, sir, he’ll never run another yard.
I broke his heart this night. I raced him from beyant
Moore-o’-Barns, and he’ll never thravel agin.’ Mr. Bianconi told me
he was obliged to show the greatest gratification at the loss of his
beast; but it gave him enough of the opposition car, which there and
then came to an end, like the poor horse. The habit of travelling on
a car increased among a people when they had become alive to its
advantage.”
The main principle on which Bianconi acted was never to despise poor
people, or apparently small interests. “His great enterprise,” wrote Dr.
Cook Taylor, “arose from the problems, how to make a two-wheeled car pay
while running for the accommodation of poor districts and poor people, as
regularly as the mail-coaches did for the rich; and when that was solved,
how to regulate a system of traffic by a network of cars, the cars
increasing in size as the traffic required, from the short one-horse car,
holding six people, to the long four-horse car, holding twenty people.”
One extract more will give the reader Mr. Bianconi’s secret of
money-making:—
“I remember when I was earning a shilling a day in Clonmel, I used to
live upon eightpence, and that did not prevent the people from making
me their mayor. I did the same at Cashel and at Thurles, and that
does not prevent me from at present living between the towns, on a
property of seven miles circumference, and on which I pay her Majesty
£7 2_s._ 6_d._ per year, or from being a J.P. or a D.L.
“It gives me sincere pleasure in seeing you follow the sound
principle of having your wants within your means. Don’t be fond of
changes. It is better for you to be at the head of a small republic
than at the foot of a great one.”
Mrs. O’Connell writes:—
“I may add, as a postscript, what my father once said to a young
Yorkshireman, ‘Keep before the wheels, young man, or they will run
over you. Always keep before the wheels.’”
In his way, Mr. Bianconi was a religious man. He and his priest were
always on good terms. He did not run his cars on a Sunday, because the
Irish, being a religious people, will not travel for business on that
day. He also found his horses worked better for one day’s rest in seven.
With Daniel O’Connell he was on the most intimate terms, and Sheil was
often a guest at his house. He was an out-and-out Liberal, and always
maintained that when the Tory landlords saw that they would fail to get
one of their own party into parliament, they encouraged their tenants to
vote for the Home Rule nominee, in the hope of balking the steady-going
Liberal who could afford to be honest. “I have known,” writes Mrs.
O’Connell, “a great Protestant land-owner boast of having given tacit
support to the ultra-Liberal candidate, in the pious hope that he could
thereby cause mischief in the Liberal benches.”
It is not pleasant to read that Bianconi, true friend to Ireland as he
was, narrowly escaped the penalty too generally attached to ownership of
land in Ireland. It was said that he was marked out to be shot!—it was
even thought that the deed had been planned and attempted, and frustrated
only by the parish priest, who asked him to take a seat in his gig on his
way home from Cashel. Bianconi had driven in from Longfield in his own
carriage, but he accepted the priest’s invitation and went back with him.
It seems there are two roads leading from Cashel towards Longfield House,
and the priest chose the longer of the two. “Why do you take this road?”
said Bianconi. “I prefer it,” replied the priest, and nothing more was
said about it then; but it was suspected that the old priest had heard
something, or got some warning, for it afterwards became known that a
party of men had that night been watching on the other road. Happily for
the credit of Ireland, Bianconi expired peacefully in 1873, at a ripe old
age, as is manifest when we state that he was born in 1786. One of his
last acts was characteristic. Struck with paralysis, he discovered,
about a week before his death an error of eightpence in the deduction for
poor-rates out of a large rent cheque. Verily, of such is the kingdom of
Mammon. Mrs. O’Connell, however, has done her best to make her father’s
memory fragrant; but she is a novice in the art of book-making, and we
must take the will for the deed. Let us hope her countrymen will study
the example she holds out to them of a man industrious, and careful, and
economical, and eager for the main chance. It is such men Ireland needs
far more than agitators for Home Rule. In the colonies no one learns
more readily the value of thrift than the Irishman, or gives us a finer
example of how to reap the golden harvest which it ensures; but in his
native land the Irishman loves more to spend money than earn it. Sir
Thomas Dargan, the great railway contractor, was, however, one of those
exceptions which teach us how, even in his native land, the poorest
Irishman may amass a fortune. Young Dargan received a good education,
and after leaving school was placed in a surveyor’s office. With little
beyond this training, and a character for the strictest integrity, he
left Ireland to push his fortunes. His first employment was under
Telford, who was then engaged in constructing the Holyhead Road. When
this was completed Dargan returned to Ireland, and embarked in several
minor undertakings, in which he was fortunate enough to gain sufficient
to form the nucleus of that princely fortune which entitled him to the
appellation of a millionaire. After the highly successful result of the
Great Exhibition of 1851, Mr. Dargan, with the view of developing the
industrial resources of his native country, and with a munificence
certainly without parallel in one who had been “the architect of his own
fortune,” resolved on founding an Industrial Exhibition in Dublin, and
placed £20,000 in the hands of a committee, consisting of the leading
citizens, and empowered them to erect a building, and to defray all the
necessary expenses connected with the undertaking, on the sole condition
that no begging-box should be handed found for further contributions. He
undertook, moreover, to advance whatever additional sums might be
required to carry the enterprise to a successful issue. In fact, before
the Exhibition opened (May 12, 1853), Mr. Dargan’s advances are said not
to have fallen far short of £100,000.