Readers here may be interested to know, if they don’t already, that on the 5th of November 1857 notice was published in the Dublin Evening Packet and Correspondent that the Irish land commissioners had ordered the sale of the estate of Lisabuck in County Monaghan. Lisabuck, having for decades been in the hands of Rev. John Wright of Killeevan when he died in 1847, was now regarded in law as the property of William Nixon Wright.
As we know, for good reasons Wright was never to return to Ireland under his own name to claim Lisabuck. So the commissioners, having learned from a ‘petitioner’ that the estate had for 10 years now been held by an absentee landlord (and was quite possibly heavily encumbered with debt), had determined to place the property on the open market. This they were famously entitled to do under current Irish land law, so long as the remaining ‘Owners’ were publicly invited, as they were in the notice I’ve mentioned, to post their objections or claims prior to its sale.
My immediate interest is in these ‘owners’. Two of those named were William Nixon Wright’s sister Caroline Wright and her husband John Shaw; a third was solicitor and wealthy land speculator, John Litton; and along with them was Rev. Richard Hastings Graves. Graves, the ‘petitioner’ who had requested that the estate be sold so that its owners and creditors could recover its value, was the surviving executor of John Brinkley, the erstwhile Bishop of Cloyne (d. 1835). John Litton, as a close acquaintance of the Bishop, had in the will attested to the Bishop’s handwriting.
But two more ‘Owners’ were named: Thomas Perring Tipper and his wife Catherine Emily Tipper.
This last couple lived for two decades in what happens now to be my house in Dartmouth, Devon (England). Thomas Tipper, son of a sailmaker in the same building, was among other things both the landlord of the Marine Tavern next door and for 13 years the Harbormaster of this medieval and still vibrant port. When at 48 in 1870 he died of apoplexy at the Tavern, the ships in the harbor lowered their flags to half mast. Catherine herself carried on as the publican a year or two more, and died in 1876.
How did Catherine come to be a co-owner of Lisabuck (and what may have brought her to England?). Born around 1816, in 1871 as ‘head’ she told the census-taker she was from County Monaghan. She was a contemporary of and quite possibly related to Rev. John Wright’s children — perhaps a younger sister or a cousin of William Nixon, Caroline, Elizabeth and John Jr. But she may have been a Shaw, or of the Nixon family after whom her brother was named, or she may have been a descendent of the family of their mother Mary. (It is almost certainly through Mary Sloane that the Wrights came into possession of Lisabuck. From 1667 its holders had been the Bradshaw family until 2 September 1774, when Isabella Bradshaw — the tenth and youngest of the children of the last line and among 5 brothers without male heirs — married John Sloane, who lived on at Lisabuck for the next quarter-century.)
And there is the intriguing puzzle as to what if any relationship the Wrights may have had to Bishop John Brinkley, and/or to the petitioner Richard Hastings Graves — who was, after all, a brother-in-law of two of the Bishops’ children. Just after John Wright had become rector and vicar of Killeevan, the Bishop was for a time rector of Clones, 4 miles from there and 3 miles from Lisabuck. His son John Jr was curate of Contibret, Co. Monaghan, where Rev. John Wright had been vicar before taking up the living at Killeevan — and there may be still more intimate connections between the families. It is possible that, since until the 1858 sale Lisabuck had been held by fee-farm and ‘under lease for ever’, it may be either the Brinkleys or the Church of Ireland that had truly ‘owned’ the estate.
A year after the publication of the notice of intention to sell, on 26 November 1858 the lands of Lisabuck, ‘desirably situated’, ‘of superior quality’, and clearly at the center of a lush social web, were purchased by another solicitor, Mr. J. H. Nunn — in trust for the Bishop’s close associate John Litton.
I’d be grateful for any information leading to the discovery of the whereabouts of Catherine Emily Tippers’ place in it all. Was she a Sloane? a Shaw? a Brinkley? a Graves? a Nixon? a Litton? Has anyone another name that fits her better? I’m sure she wasn’t Wrong, but was she a Wright?
Cris
